No Zytrons In Range

Don’t get too excited, this isn’t a full blog entry, just a quick list of obvious bugs:

• Font sizes are too small and there is no ability to enlarge them. Additionally, Steam doesn’t work properly with Windows DPI settings, so fonts can’t be enlarged the usual way.
• Cloud data can’t be browsed or deleted except through a support ticket. If you are in an environment with limited space (an SSD drive), and download a game with large saves (Oblivion), Steam forces you to also download the cloud data content for that game– even if there are multiple gigabytes of it.
• Pre-ordered games don’t have a scheduler to “unencrypt” their files when (or slightly before, ideally) the game is released. Since the “unencryption” can take a significant amount of time, half an hour or more, this forces gamers excited to play their new game to wait before playing– even if the game has been pre-loaded on the computer, and even if the release date was hours and hours ago.
• Categories: Once you’ve created a category, you can never rename or delete it. Ever. You can’t make subcategories. You can’t drag&drop games into categories. You can’t assign a category to a dozen games at a time. There are no auto-generated categories (for example, game genre.) There’s no way to turn on/off category display in the list of games (except that categories aren’t displayed in Grid View, for some reason). The feature as implemented is very, very weak.
• Remote install: A nice feature, but you can only install games you’ve purchased. This means you can’t remotely install free-to-play games because you can’t purchase them.

In general, Steam has a habit of half-specifying features (or fully-specifying them and only half-implementing them), and then never ever ever fixing them. For the font size issue, I’m hoping eventually a disabled rights groups gets on their ass about it, but for the other bugs I don’t see much hope.

Although it is worth noting that Steam support representatives have the capability to clear-out cloud data for a specific title for a specific user. If Valve had enough support requests to do this, they might finally add a self-service option just to save the labor costs.