Trying to send a sticker in Steam Chat burned through a month of mobile data

https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1m000kp/trying_to_send_a_sticker_in_steam_chat_burned/

by danso • 1 year ago

98 86 1 year ago

old.reddit.com

For context, Steam has never really supported mobile devices for using the Steam store. It kind of makes sense if you think about it.

gowld• 1 year ago

SteamDeck says what?

prophesi• 1 year ago

Steam Deck uses a desktop OS (Arch), and Steam's Big Picture mode is well-optimized for controllers.

mopenstein• 1 year ago

Everybody on the planet knows that the modern cellphone is really just a portable vacuum connected directly to people's wallets and steam doesn't want a piece of that action?

They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.

haunter3• 1 year ago

They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.

They have monopoly on the whole unregulated digital gambling market which makes much much more

Ekaros4• 1 year ago

I think it is reasonable option to not compete in those markets largely controlled by existing players.

Especially when they really are rolling in money from selling desktop games. Taking 20% and courts most likely won't stop them as they do not control the platforms.

Farbklex• 1 year ago

Yeah, that is strange, especially since we now have the technology to actually play full blown PC versions via abstraction layers on Android phones. A steam store with existing games on mobile is now possible.

morsch• 1 year ago

There's a Steam app that's basically the store?

hombre_fatal• 1 year ago

Does it make sense?

The PS5 ecosystem lets you buy games from your phone and your console will autodownload it for you.

Maybe the Steam store is just too big of a legacy clusterfuck to make mobile friendly. It never worked all that well even on desktop, especially on macOS. It's probably the most sluggish web app I've ever used.

esseph3• 1 year ago

I'm looking at the steam store via the mobile app on my android device. If I load up my Linux desktop and the steam app, it seems fine between the two.

Honestly I've been a steam user for.. idk how long, 15 years?

I can't say I've ever had a major issue with it, maybe I've been lucky.

Edit: Seems to be the chat app that causes this for the author in question.

Rohansi• 1 year ago

You can buy Steam games and download them to your PC from your phone, too. Only problem is the website isn't designed specifically for mobile. Most pages work well but use a lot of data to pull media.

smittywerben2• 1 year ago

A user's attempt to send a sticker reveals Valve's misguided implementation of the Y combinator, where Steam App and Steam Chat exist only to question each other's purpose.

The sole defender of this system, a user who bought a game from Steam on their mobile device, completely unaware of any Steam app, maintains that the portable wallet vacuum works as intended.

It's too late. Negative convergence of the Dyson vacuum's warranty appears inversely proportional to Gaben's proximity to retirement. The Y-combinator is reaching criticality.

The Steam Chat app opens.

Sent from my Steam™ (Claude x Gemini "Dew It Right" 2025 Black Edition).

dsizzle• 1 year ago

fwiw the substack app did this to me too

ThatMedicIsASpy3• 1 year ago

They were browsing the point shop. On Desktop (FF ctrlF5) this page loads 20-30MB of data. A mix of gif webm and animated pngs

https://store.steampowered.com/points/shop

jorvi2• 1 year ago

This is one thing that Telegram did right with their .tgs animated sticker format (based on Lottie) and that somehow no one else in the message space seems to want to take the effort to replicate.

JSON and vector-based, heavily optimized for filesize and battery use.

keyringlight2• 1 year ago

I wonder if it's a consequence of Valve's core business is dealing with delivering data for games regularly in the 10's of GB range, they assume most of their customers are on connections good enough for game downloads so they must be using the store and chat via the same. I guess if it's not unpleasant enough for a large group of people to prevent commerce from happening, then it's not worth putting engineering effort into (or however they allocate effort at Valve now).

threetonesun• 1 year ago

Vector-based limits or at least requires rethinking the artwork design, and for stickers that are mostly ripped from game assets that might be effort than it's worth for Steam stickers.

stefan_• 1 year ago

Just scrolling up and down on this loads another 30MiB every cycle. No visible change.

msgodel• 1 year ago

Steam has always been a pig with data.

When I used to live with my parents I specifically bought the physical Orange box so I could play portal and half life without having to download anything over the horribly slow and metered satellite connection.

Steam immediately forced a multi-day process of downloading and updating steam, then downloading and updating portal, before I was able to launch the game and have it crash from broken GMA950 drivers.

I buy maybe one game a year these days but I always buy it from GOG pretty much because of that experience.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 1 year ago

I had to learn that same lesson with Civ 5.

Fogest6• 1 year ago

The huge amount of data steam used on the store that people are pointing out in the reddit comments makes me wonder if this is why I am having so many problems on their store. For the last half year or so I have found that Steam store pages load very slow for me. It feels like I am loading in their pages on dial-up. I have been suspecting it could be my ISP throttling the Steam connection, but no other download/streaming service or anything seems to have this same problem. And going on a VPN or different browser doesn't resolve the problem.

I wonder if the issue is simply that it is loading a ton of data and my connection just isn't fast enough. Time to monitor the network traffic while browsing Steam I guess.

esseph3• 1 year ago

Try the steam website and see if you have the same problem?

Fogest6• 1 year ago

The funny thing is that it actually works fine for me on their mobile app, which is the same app this post talks about with the poor data usage.

It just seems to be on my PC. It's only on the store. Even download speeds seem okay. But regardless of whether I use the client, Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, they all are slow for the store page. Even things like the community pages and workshop all load fine. It makes zero sense to me why things like pictures/videos in their store load insanely slow for me, yet the images in things like the workshop have zero problem.

I've been trying to figure out what is wrong for quite some time and haven't figured out what could be causing it.

spondyl• 1 year ago

Not to beat on frontend but I vaguely remember that the UI was rebuilt with React a couple of years back and the other day while browsing a sale, specifically hovering over Final Fantasy XIII would crash an entire sales widget, printing out a React error. I wonder if this is just a case of framework bloat getting out of hand (again)

OsrsNeedsf2P• 1 year ago

People give React far too much credit.

Source: I've had the privilege to ask questions to some of the engineers on that team...

Fogest6• 1 year ago

It could be, or maybe poorly optimized assets? I always have such a problem loading the pictures and videos associated with each game.

I've used other sites that are fully React based that run quite well and don't have these issues. So I can't imagine it is specifically the frameworks fault.

But I do find if developers use these big frameworks and don't use them properly, the slowdowns can be much more pronounced.

ASalazarMX2• 1 year ago

The new Steam UI was incredibly bloated at the start, it was frequent (in my experience) for it to force close because it wouldn't fit in RAM along with the active game. It got better, but I'm still not loving it.

Maybe I'm prejudiced to React and its variants, because I have never used a React app I liked, just React apps that are useful despite their shortcomings.

benoau2• 1 year ago

I wonder wtf is in the 200+ megabyte installer that has to download every other day if not the data the store needs...

Ekaros4• 1 year ago

Downloading the same browser engine that everyone else uses too time and time again as more bugs and security issues are found in it...

Fogest6• 1 year ago

Wait, when is this occuring? I don't recall any installer downloading every other day. Is this something from maybe being on the beta branch of Steam or something? Or am I just missing this?

ASalazarMX2• 1 year ago

I launch it almost daily. Last Steam (on Linux) proper update was weeks ago. I think a new version of Proton was released like a week ago, though.

It's not a frequent occurrence, unless I have too many games installed, but then those are the downloaded games updating stuff, not Steam. Uninstall the ones you're not going to play in a while if that's becoming a problem.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 12 months ago

That's a glitch i faced on my previous pc and fixed it by fully uninstalling.

Steam redownloads the client when it shuts down "dirty" to fix itself, but to me it was happening basically every time.

LorenDB• 1 year ago

Why are ISPs apparently limiting some plans to just 1 GB of data? That's not nearly enough for 2025.

toast0• 1 year ago

For mobile data, if you have access to immobile data at home and work, 1GB is reasonable if you're not streaming while you're out.

If it's 1GB hard cap, you might have some bad months, but 1GB fast data and unlimited slow data is totally doable.

reaperducer• 1 year ago

For mobile data, if you have access to immobile data at home and work, 1GB is reasonable if you're not streaming while you're out.

The people who are downvoting you must be terminally online.

Like you, I use wifi at home and work. My mobile data use is typically around 150MB/month.

Rygian• 1 year ago

Lack of real market choice for consumers.

dbspin• 1 year ago

I get 120GB a month 'fair use' on my 20 euro a month plan here in Ireland. If I exceed that, my speed is slowed down, but internet continues to work. In other words, its not something I need to think about. These kinds of plans seem to be ubiquitous everywhere in the world now - with the exception of the USA, Canada and Australia / New Zealand.

ragazzina• 1 year ago

I get 150GB for €8 in Italy but my ISP is trying to convince me to move to 200GB/€10.

ThatMedicIsASpy3• 1 year ago

Because some people do not waste money?. I pay 1€ for 1GB of data. Most of the time I use 0MB. Germany.

If it did not take 1 day to activate I would cancel every month and only pay when I actually have a need.

dangus5• 1 year ago

If you can eat out of the dumpster for free we can argue that buying food at the grocery store is a waste of money too, right?

At some point extreme frugality like that just means you aren’t a customer at all. There is no app that could satisfy your desire to not waste data transfer.

pavon• 1 year ago

They are low-cost plans. I pay $7 a month for a plan with 1GB data and unlimited text and calls and really appreciate having that option, since I'm on wifi 99% of the time.

BigGreenJorts• 1 year ago

Cries in Canada

I have a very similar phone plan (with some extra gift gigs I've received over the years). I mostly pay to keep the number, use maps. Most other times I'm on wifi.

autoexec3• 1 year ago

what is the point of a digital sticker? What are you supposed to stick it to?

ascagnel_• 1 year ago

At one point, your Counter-Strike guns.

autoexec3• 1 year ago

Wow, I looked it up and it's depressing that people are paying money for that at all but some of the prices are insane. What a scam. I'm surprised there isn't a bunch of mods letting people add them for free/design their own.

ang_cire2• 1 year ago

Actual answer is your chat window. The steam app has a friends chat function, and "stickers" that are often game-specific images or gifs, can be sent, e.g. [1] this bouncing sheep from Mabinogi:

[1] https://imgur.com/a/N4LE2lx

autoexec3• 1 year ago

At 600+ MB that must of been an amazing gif...

micromacrofoot2• 1 year ago

Steam has an enormous amount of headway, and I'm a massive fan of what they've done... but they're going to lose ground with their laissez-faire development practices, I run into random issues like this all the time with the store.

Ekaros4• 1 year ago

Have not checked GoG galaxy lately, but maybe it is my stockholm syndrome. But other stores do not really feel better. That is Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox... Haven't checked EA lately, but that was also a mess flipping between Origin and EA something...

Seems, like simple efficient store and download manager should be solved issue. But what do I know...

micromacrofoot2• 1 year ago

Yeah really Steam continues to succeed because everyone else is so bad at it, and the smaller players don't have the benefit of getting in early. Epic and Microsoft are maybe the best positioned to pull if off, but they've done a lot of fumbling so far.

tetrisgm• 1 year ago

Would you say you were delighted?

ars• 1 year ago

The big companies really don't seem to care about low bandwidth users.

I attempted to use Teams website once over a very low speed hotspot. It utterly failed. It just kept reloading the same resource over and over and over, maybe it didn't wait long enough? Not sure. But it never worked.

I then tried the teams app, and that was no better. It would get stuck on the main screen and couldn't go any further.

So then I tried outlook, desktop client. Total fail there as well, it couldn't seem to manage to download a couple emails.

I finally resorted to ssh and using a command line.

I feel like a old man screaming get off my lawn, but it really seems like the new programmers need to use old computers for a while and learn how to be more efficient.

sitzkrieg• 1 year ago

steam, like every other program that switched to web based uis are simply flat out worse in every way. even browsing the old store in cef was lightyears ahead

Trying to send a sticker in Steam Chat burned through a month of mobile data

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