Why Are Non-Steam Clients So Badly Optimised?

[Deleted member 27751]

There was a time when Steam was the only launcher available for PC gaming and those times were both dark and light with a range of reason from a huge variety of titles to choose from to launch days of big titles causing Steam to blow up and be non-functional. My title doesn't excuse past Steam or even present Steam, as there are still issues to do with more the design discoverability aspect of Steam, but my question is more on the non-Steam competitors.

Why is it then that we have competitive publishers who are mainly seeking higher profits from their titles (a fair enough reason albeit one filled with its own controversial topic) creating these bastardised launchers that are so significantly worse than the competition they so hate and demonise for stealing all the profit? Again, Steam isn't a saint and has learnt a heck of a lot in its many years on the market, but that is your golden standard competition yet services like Uplay, Origin, Epic and GoG all suffer when it comes to usability and performance. Why do they run like a treacle treadmill? Why do I feel like I'm fighting the system just to play a game?

This especially comes to light with Epic Games Store, who so vehemently fights against the monopoly yet offers such poor usability in their client that it makes me less interested in wanting to invest in the ecosystem. Do the clients actually run well and maybe I am just a unique case of everything is broken? I run a Ryzen 1700 coupled with a 1070 and 16GB DDR4 3000Mhz so I'd say my system can most definitely handle some measly clients but maybe I'm wrong there?

TLDR; Why are non-Steam clients so badly optimised against the big, bad monopoly boogieman?

 

[Dreams-Visions]

It costs a lot of time and money to reach Steam levels of depth and performance.

 

[OldSocksAndShoes]

Other stores are buying exclusivity for games, Steam bought exclusivity for optimization.

 

[spam musubi]

It's almost like there's a reason why steam is the industry leader (note: not monopoly) and it's because it's the best on almost every axis, which is why competitors are trying to steal away games because they can't compete on the quality of the service.

 

[Deleted member 27751]

It's almost like there's a reason why steam is the industry leader (note: not monopoly) and it's because it's the best on almost every axis, which is why competitors are trying to steal away games because they can't compete on the quality of the service.

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That I understand too, in a desperation sort of way. It just seems oddly so common sense of an approach to actually give a decent enough launcher that is optimised so I can actually use it without fighting it. That way I'd be way more keen to invest in your ecosystem rather than go on a forum and get angry because I just tried to use your launcher and it fought against me to do so.

 

[spam musubi]

That I understand too, in a desperation sort of way. It just seems oddly so common sense of an approach to actually give a decent enough launcher that is optimised so I can actually use it without fighting it. That way I'd be way more keen to invest in your ecosystem rather than go on a forum and get angry because I just tried to use your launcher and it fought against me to do so.

Click to shrink...

It takes experience and resources to build a good client and valve clearly has more of one or the other (or both) than any competition.

 

[Fire Bocchi]

the only pc client that i would ever call badly optimized would be steam

 

[Theta]

They aren't though. I never had any problems, performance wise, running any of the launchers as you prescribed.
EGS is the only one that promises more shares in profits, the others besides Itch.io (which is more customizable in terms of revenue obtained) takes the standard 30% of profits made from sales.

 

[water_wendi]

What was the response when the same objections were made about Steam years ago? i think ill go with "im too busy playing the game to watch Task Manager like a hawk."

 

[Quad Lasers]

You're going to have to give something concrete in terms of CPU and ram usage if you actually want to discuss performance between these launchers.

 

[RedFury]

Yeah I dont get it either. You know the competition, iterate on what you'd like on top of that as a consumer and you have gold.

 

[Stardestroyer]

It is simple. I

It's almost like there's a reason why steam is the industry leader (note: not monopoly) and it's because it's the best on almost every axis, which is why competitors are trying to steal away games because they can't compete on the quality of the service.

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No steam is the market leader because of first mover advantage. For some odd reason nobody wanted to create their own store until years after Valve did. The client being optimize is simply a side effect of being in the market for so long.

It is kinda like how WoW is still market leader, it has been in the market for so long that peeople don't want to leave it, due to all the time they spent and the fact that WoW content over the past 14 years can never be matched by a competitor, without an billions to piss away.

 

[Windu]

steam is optimized?

 

[MC_Leon6494]

"only launcher available for PC gaming"

uhh, pretty sure Blizzard's Battle.net launcher existed long before Steam. Also the other clients aren't really poorly optimized or built, except Uplay.

 

[Rickenslacker]

Wha? Battle.net, Uplay, Epic, and Origin are all pretty snappy for me. I don't use the itch or Twitch apps often but they're alright in my use too. All of 'em are even snappier than Steam when it comes to pulling it from the tray. Bethesda and Windows Store suck, I'll grant you that.

 

[Hellsing321]

"only launcher available for PC gaming"

uhh, pretty sure Blizzard's Battle.net launcher existed long before Steam. Also the other clients aren't really poorly optimized or built, except Uplay.

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The Battle.net launcher came out in 2013. Battle.net before then was just a service integrated directly into blizzard's games to facilitate chat, friends lists and matchmaking.

 

[Deleted member 420]

Origin used to be a snappy and easy to use client, but after an update a few years ago, it's been really unpleasant to use. Really slow loading in my games library.

 

[Chivalry]

Origin is way snappier than Steam. Uplay's pretty good, too.

 

[spam musubi]

It is simple. I

No steam is the market leader because of first mover advantage. For some odd reason nobody wanted to create their own store until years after Valve did. The client being optimize is simply a side effect of being in the market for so long.

It is kinda like how WoW is still market leader, it has been in the market for so long that peeople don't want to leave it, due to all the time they spent and the fact that WoW content over the past 14 years can never be matched by a competitor, without an billions to piss away.

Click to shrink...

There were MMOs before wow, EverQuest is still around and Ultima Online still kind of is. GFWL used to be a thing but it was a trash fire.

Steam has a time advantage on many other clients but GOG, Uplay and origin have also been around for many years now.

 

[Border]

Steam doesn't exactly seem like a slick and optimized piece of software. Feels like a slow browser front-end. Shifting between tabs and loading pages is pretty slow.

 

[tyfon]

Most of them are probably only webviews that pulls JS, html and json from a server.
That's usually not a good way to make optimised clients.

It's an easy way to make "dynamic" interfaces though.

I don't know though, steam is the only one that runs on linux so that's the one I'm using.

 

[collige]

Someone post that chart that shows the RAM usage of all the clients

 

[Deleted member 15440]

i don't have any issues with origin or egs but battlenet is horrible about eating up CPU for no reason

 

[Fire Bocchi]

ost of them are probably only webviews that pulls JS, html and json from a server.
That's usually not a good way to make optimised clients.

Click to shrink...

that's literally what steam is outside of big picture mode, every tab other than library is just steam loading the steam website

 

[RedFury]

I think OP meant feature rich VS "optimized" and I agree.

 

[funky]

Personally never had any "performance" issues with other stores outside of obvious Windows Store issues and random Steam issues that you are bound to bump into after you have been using it for 10 years

 

[tyfon]

that's literally what steam is outside of big picture mode, every tab other than library is just steam loading the steam website

Click to shrink...

Yeah, I'm not saying steam is a virtue of optimisation either :)
But I guess that's why all the store fronts suck.

 

[CharMomone]

The worst optimized client would be the nexon game launcher, it actively degrades system performance when running in the background.

 

[Conkerkid11]

Ehhh... I'd hardly call Steam optimized.

 

[Richietto]

Because Valve actually cares about having a good client.

 

[nullref]

The Steam client has been under active development for what, 15 years? Longer? And their entire business revolves around that client. It takes a long time for software to mature.

While the different stores/launchers have their own quality and/or usability issues, I can't say any of them have been bad enough for me to really resent having to use them. I launch them, I click a few times, I launch a game. If I haven't used one in a while, their need to update on launch can be a bit annoying, I guess.

 

[Atom Heart Mother]

"only launcher available for PC gaming"

uhh, pretty sure Blizzard's Battle.net launcher existed long before Steam. Also the other clients aren't really poorly optimized or built, except Uplay.

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Battle.net launcher didn't exist until late 2013.

 

[Richietto]

The Steam client has been under active development for what, 15 years? Longer? And their entire business revolves around that client. It takes a long time for software to mature.

While the different stores/launchers have their own quality and/or usability issues, I can't say any of them have been bad enough for me to really resent having to use them. I launch them, I click a few times, I launch a game. If I haven't used one in a while, their need to update on launch can be a bit annoying, I guess.

Click to shrink...

Origin is the only one I find to be actual shit. Uplay was like that as well for a time. Still while Valve has had a loooong time to make Steam what it is some of these other clients have been around for a while now and still function almost the exact same as they use to.

 

[ZeroX]

This is weird thread to see as I currently can't connect to Steam network

 

[HarryDemeanor]

I wouldn't exactly call Steam optimized either. They all run sluggish.

 

[Deleted member 49535]

Never had any performance issues with any of the launchers. I do have problems with usability, and Steam is not precisely one of the good ones there.

 

[BernardoOne]

EGS uses webms at the top of every store page. It's fucking insane this was approved.

 

[Bhonar]

umm, is what the OP said actually even true??

I don't have any performance problems with Uplay or Origin. Never tried Epic or GOG

 

[Butterworth]

Total opposite for me.

Steam can be slow and laggy for me. Rarely get that on Uplay or GOG.

 

[elelunicy]

Also the other clients aren't really poorly optimized or built, except Uplay.

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Really? Uplay at its current state is very fast/lightweight and rather virtually appealing (more so than Steam). I'm very impressed by how well built it is.

Origin meanwhile used to be good but ever since they switched to the current design several years ago it's been really slow/unresponsive. I have no idea how could there be so much lag just navigating through the my game library page, considering how powerful my PC is.

 

[Deleted member 27751]

You're going to have to give something concrete in terms of CPU and ram usage if you actually want to discuss performance between these launchers.

Click to shrink...

Click to shrink...

What is most interesting is Origin actively writes to a log file, though I'm not sure if Steam does but it is handled by the webhelper services. What I find is that Steam will actively push down its system usage whereas Origin just stays steadfast in resource management not really trying to reduce when not needed. Almost like everything is open no matter if it is using the client in foreground or not.

The Steam client has been under active development for what, 15 years? Longer? And their entire business revolves around that client. It takes a long time for software to mature.

While the different stores/launchers have their own quality and/or usability issues, I can't say any of them have been bad enough for me to really resent having to use them. I launch them, I click a few times, I launch a game. If I haven't used one in a while, their need to update on launch can be a bit annoying, I guess.

Click to shrink...

I most definitely do agree in that Valve has had an exceptional amount of time to get things in order and still are fighting to do so when it comes to discovering in the vast library of games. Heck I remember the great days of Half-Life 2 launching and that being just a shit show of performance issues when all I wanted to do was just play my damn game.

My problem is the lack of polish on these newer clients coming in to battle Steam. It is what they are doing even if not intentionally like Epic, because you are asking people to buy your game through your service rather than the competitors, yet your performance is absolutely hit and miss as seen by others on both sides in this thread. For me the big culprit is Epic Game Store and Origin, namely in just how sluggish it feels to use them. Especially Origin which was so damn snappy but is now filled to the brim with crap I don't need that bogs the client down.

 

[BernardoOne]

umm, is what the OP said actually even true??

I don't have any performance problems with Uplay or Origin. Never tried Epic or GOG

Click to shrink...

Uplay is fine but Origin is a absolute shitshow

 

[tolkir]

Slowest client to open for me. (I use Steam, GOG, Twitch and Epic)

 

[pezzie]

Is Origin scaling still broken at 4k?

 

[Weebos]

I've only used a few clients, but Steam has been the one that performed the worst for me. Origin in particular was the smoothest when I used it, but that was years ago.

 

[Youngfossil]

nvm

 

[Zombegoast]

Steam, GOG, Uplay and Epic Launcher works fine.

But Origin is shit. The only client that requires the use of UAC and slows down the computer.

 

[Deleted member 24118]

Bethesda Launcher is a wreck.

It was unresponsive, it somehow consumed 4mb of my bandwidth doing absolutely nothing. Quake Champions took me 6 minutes to download on Steam; on Bethesda's launcher, it took six hours and took up so much bandwidth that it made my Internet completely unusable for the entire duration. Even before that, despite telling the launcher to install my game to a different drive (Launcher was installed on my OS drive (120 GB SSD, with very little room)), it actively decided to download the game to where the launcher was installed - BUT, despite not having room enough to actually download everything, it kept going. The percentage kept counting up and downloading at an alarmingly slow rate. Not once did it say "Hey chief, not enough room to download on the drive. Try installing the launcher elsewhere" so I didn't even notice until the next day.

The Bethesda launcher would forget my password randomly, so I constantly had to reset it. It made me relog in every few days. The UI is shockingly awful and buggy - when I installed it for the Fallout 4 creation kit, the bar on the left was full of games I didn't own. So dragged them all off and it made me leave one of them. So I then added the Creation Kit to the list and removed the game that was stuck there and then my Creation Kit icon just transformed into a Wolfenstein 2 icon. So after that I thought that I wouldn't use the sidebar, and after that I reopened the launcher to do stuff with the Creation Kit again, but there were like 50 icons for the Creation Kit and like 2 for Fallout 76. I couldn't remove any of them. So it was just broken.

I brought all this up to their tech support and they just threw their arms up in confusion (because what are they going to do, the software is broken). Reinstalling it didn't fix it so I just stopped bothering.

 

[JD3Nine]

Bethesda Launcher is a wreck.

It was unresponsive, it somehow consumed 4mb of my bandwidth doing absolutely nothing. Quake Champions took me 6 minutes to download on Steam; on Bethesda's launcher, it took six hours and took up so much bandwidth that it made my Internet completely unusable for the entire duration. Even before that, despite telling the launcher to install my game to a different drive (Launcher was installed on my OS drive (120 GB SSD, with very little room)), it actively decided to download the game to where the launcher was installed - BUT, despite not having room enough to actually download everything, it kept going. The percentage kept counting up and downloading at an alarmingly slow rate. Not once did it say "Hey chief, not enough room to download on the drive. Try installing the launcher elsewhere" so I didn't even notice until the next day.

The Bethesda launcher would forget my password randomly, so I constantly had to reset it. It made me relog in every few days. The UI is shockingly awful and buggy - when I installed it for the Fallout 4 creation kit, the bar on the left was full of games I didn't own. So dragged them all off and it made me leave one of them. So I then added the Creation Kit to the list and removed the game that was stuck there and then my Creation Kit icon just transformed into a Wolfenstein 2 icon. So after that I thought that I wouldn't use the sidebar, and after that I reopened the launcher to do stuff with the Creation Kit again, but there were like 50 icons for the Creation Kit and like 2 for Fallout 76. I couldn't remove any of them. So it was just broken.

I brought all this up to their tech support and they just threw their arms up in confusion (because what are they going to do, the software is broken). Reinstalling it didn't fix it so I just stopped bothering.

Click to shrink...

Haha. I've heard some stories. Bethesda's launcher sounds like the ninth circle of hell.

They all have something about them that is just kind of off compared to Steam. Origin forgets my log in regularly, GoG Galaxy has super slow downloads sometimes, Battle.net takes forever to update and Uplay gives you ads when you close a game. Steam just works for me 98% of the time.

 

[Deleted member 27751]

Bethesda Launcher is a wreck.

Click to shrink...

I didn't mention Bethesda's launcher because I wouldn't even call it a launcher. It is an absolute piece of trash software that hinders playing games.