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Steam UI Update Beta Drops IE Rendering For WebKit

Posted by Soulskill on from the what-a-coincidence-with-battle.net-in-beta-too dept.

Citing massive growth in their user base ("25 million users, 1000+ games, 12 billion player minutes per month, and 75 billion Steam client minutes per month"), Valve unveiled a revamped UI for Steam on Tuesday, opening the beta test to anyone who wants to try it out. There are many changes, and an increased focus on social features: "Right from within your own game Library, you can now track which of your friends plays each game or invite them to play one with you. Before you've even bought a game, knowing whether your friends play it is one of the most useful pieces of information to have. So on the store homepage, there's a new listing of what your friends have bought or played lately." Tracking games and achievements have both gotten simpler, and Valve has dropped the Internet Explorer rendering engine in favor of WebKit. An enterprising user also found files that may indicate the existence of an OS X Steam client.

15 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Why OSX? by TheVelvetFlamebait · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Exactly how many steam games have OSX versions? Does anyone actually game with Macs?

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    You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
    1. Re:Why OSX? by oiron · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Maybe they're trying to create the market?

    2. Re:Why OSX? by sopssa · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Quite many games in stores at least have that PC&Mac logo, so I don't see why it wouldn't be the same in Steam.

      And even if not currently, Steam gained popularity on PC because it was the first online platform to buy and play games (it wasn't as good as it is now, they had to work a lot on it). Now they're first on Mac's too and will dominate that market too.

    3. Re:Why OSX? by iainl · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Since you need to be logged in to your steam account, that's phenomenally easy for them to enforce, too.

      --
      "I Know You Are But What Am I?"
    4. Re:Why OSX? by Masami+Eiri · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Give it time.

    5. Re:Why OSX? by Pojut · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Uh...why was parent modded troll for pointing out that the Mac version of Torchlight isn't out yet? Come on, people...if you are going to mod, at least try to mod appropriately. For example, you should mod down my post because I'm about to make a shameless self-plug.

      Here is my review of Torchlight: http://livingwithanerd.com/torchlight/

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      Living With a Nerd
    6. Re:Why OSX? by Ephemeriis · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Exactly how many steam games have OSX versions? Does anyone actually game with Macs?

      Gaming has never been that huge on the Mac. A large part of this is limited retail shelf space... If a retailer knows the PC version of a game is more likely to sell than the Mac one, they're more likely to stock the PC one. Which means less shelf space for Macs... So less Mac users go into the store to buy stuff... So you put less Mac stuff on the shelves...

      These days we're seeing the same trend with PC gaming. Consoles are taking over the market and you're seeing less and less shelf space devoted to PC games.

      But that doesn't mean that folks have stopped playing games on the PC, nor does it mean that folks don't game on the Mac - just that the marketplace you use to buy your software isn't a retail store.

      There are tons of games on Steam that you will never, ever see on a store shelf. And why not? It isn't like you're giving up physical shelf space... Storage is cheap. Throw another disk in the array and call it done!

      So, why wouldn't Valve try to expand their market a bit? Plenty of publishers still release games for the Mac... And right now they're struggling to get the games out there and in front of people's eyes... They'd probably love something like Steam.

      --
      "Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
    7. Re:Why OSX? by BlueTrin · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There is a small issue in this, as you can use steam in offline mode, this allows you to play, usually, the single player portion of the games on multiple computers, but since you can do it with two PCs this is no worse than with a Mac and a PC !

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      Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
  2. Re:I don't want to be tracked by sopssa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So then just don't use Steam. There's a difference between being tracked involuntarily a la Google Analytics and tracking your game stats and achievements on a gaming platform that contains such community features, which you signed up for.

    Your complain is like signing up to a dating site and then complaining how the girls won't leave you alone.

  3. Re:I don't want to be tracked by Krittick · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Your complain is like signing up to a dating site and then complaining how the girls won't leave you alone.

    I highly doubt most /. users will be complaining about girls not leaving us alone.

  4. Re:I don't want to be tracked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Then good luck playing any high-tier games in the near future.
    Everyone will be putting their games out through things like Steam due to the increases in piracy.

    And why do you think Valve care about you, as an individual?
    Do you think you are somehow special, amongst the X amount of users of Steam?
    You are a statistic, nothing more.

    Also, they have Asocial networks, it is called blogging with privacy mode enabled.

  5. Re:I don't want to be tracked by Culture20 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    girls? it's the men who won't leave me alone that bother me! *shudder*

    Stop playing a female night elf then. Sheesh.

  6. Re:I wonder how it works on Wine by Rogerborg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ditto. It's frustrating, since wine is now a pretty solid platform for gaming.

    I'd love to give Valve money, but I'm not paying a Microsoft Tax in order to do so. I guess we're far too small a market for them to care about though.

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  7. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  8. Re:Fixes an interesting issue. by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's even worse, because it's really easy to open URLs in default web browser - if you do ShellExecute() on an URL, that's precisely what will happen, and it's actually less code than explicitly invoking IE and passing it an URL.