PC Gaming

It's a moving target. Everything I care about video game stores now I did not care when it was new. Steam itself in 2003, need it to update to latest counter strike. By 2014 years later, I'm done managing updates for individual games by looking on websites online for downlads. I want a store client like Steam to handle that. Didn't care for the first half of Steams life. I was still buying physical PC games when I could up to 2014. That's why I said 2014

Didn't care about linux Steam because it sucked until Proton. Since Proton I care. Didn't care about big picture mode because steam machines bombed the first time and I didn't use remote play. Now I use remote play and regularly use big picture mode because I buy big phones with OLEDs and remote play is great now because of that. Phones are why I care about 21:9 support as much as I do now.

Didn't care about Steam Input because I was kb/m all day type of person. I play with gamepads more now. Steam Input is major. Indie games were less common in 2008 and a lot less complex than they are today. Easy to get the good ones because everyone talked about them. Now most good indie games have no reviews on open/metacritic. Steam reviews and curators point me to the majority of my purchased indie games. Also even the studio/publisher pages that Steam has now showing what they have released. That's the other way I find games. Steam has brand pages for a while now. I actually use those like here for koei tecmo

https://store.steampowered.com/developer/KOEITECMO

Or smaller game XD. Played Icey and ended up trying a couple games under them through the publisher Steam page

https://store.steampowered.com/developer/XD

Library organization. Did not care about the collections feature until this year. Same with the user submitted store page tags. The collections feature can create from those tags and I make custom collections too to organize my big library. I just recently learned you can drag and drop rather than right click add to collection.

Sounds simple but it sucks on pretty much every PC store platform software besides steam. Managing multiple drives. Moving game folders between drives and the store client handling it well

numerous other things that come in handy from time to time. Like user created guides. SteamOS is more featureful than the OS's on a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series before even exiting out to the desktop mode. Remember Mixer on Xbox. Steam has broadcasts and has had it for a long time now and it's never been popular but they never killed it and now I occasionally use it to check out how a new game looks. MS would have killed broadcasts like they killed Mixer when it didn't become a mega hit. Steam keeps it's niche features ongoing and generally improves over time even if at a snails pace. MS and other companies, they just kill the feature

Latest thing that is just as much Valve as it is community. PC gaming on Android. Valve initiated funding for Fex emu and it's paying dividends now that you can run a lot of Steam games on Android now. Same with recent versions of Proton/Wine that now have ARM builds for them. Major boon to Android PC game emulation. Eventually going to be a major plus for Steam in user friendliness compared to the storefronts not putting resources towards easy x86 to ARM translation support