Steaming

Last night Steam informed me that they have a new UI coming up and if I want to try it out as part of their beta program. The list of changes seemed pretty enticing, like better games management and a new browser rendering engine (WebKit instead of IE).

A few minutes later I was gazing upon the new interface. Which looks like crap. I was never a fan of oversized text-only tab headers, but hey, to each his own. The game list window has a couple of improvements, mainly you can view details about the games or see them as huge, easy-to-click buttons. The downloads section is much better now, with bandwidth graph and everything.

And there’s where I started noticing the problems. For some unknown reason, Steam decided that some of my games (Modern Warfare 2 and Company of Heroes) need to be redownloaded… At first I thought it was a patch (Steam downloads and installs patches automatically) but then I noticed the size of the downloads: 6 and 8GB! A quick search on the forums for the beta UI found a lot of people that were complaining about the same thing: games being erased from the hard drive and redownloaded. What the hell, Steam?

Oh, and one more thing: I have a Steam account, which I use to purchase and play games. Then I have a Steam Community account, where I can manage my friends, see achievements, etc. And yesterday I realized, in order to post on the forums (Steam forums that is, not some third party) I need another account??? Are you serious? Haven’t you people heard of single sign-on? Or shared user database? Argh…