This will not stand, Valve. So you’re building a new video recording system into Steam. Great! But as a result the desktop version of Steam has now lost what I consider its second-most vital button, right behind the big green Play. Valve is hiding my screenshots and I cannot overstate how much it’s sending me.
There might be some PTSD involved here. Once upon a time I owned a MacBook Air, and I loved that laptop. Brilliant piece of hardware: no Windows laptop has ever had a trackpad that good. It weighed nothing. The battery life was killer in its day. But man there were some things about Mac OS that I couldn’t stand, including particularly Apple’s preference for hiding away all my files, as if catching sight of “.jpg” would immediately stricken me with the bubonic plague. If I wanted to look at the pictures from my phone in the Photos app, easy peasy, but finding the actual files involved spelunking through some horrific sequence of folders.
One of my strongest opinions about computers is that I should not have to dig through, like, “User > Wes > .temp > astuvkcaqcf > 4748949585” just to find some damn files.
Maybe Apple’s gotten better about that in the years since—I have no idea. But to see Valve go down the same road now makes me want to pick up my PC and walk directly into the sea with it. I live about two miles away from the ocean which is a long time to carry a 30-ish pound desktop, but on the bright side, holding onto it will ensure I sink to the bottom of the sea where Steam’s screenshot interface can no longer hurt me.
For many years the Screenshot window has included an all-powerful button, a simple vehicle for raw, efficient digital scrapbooking. You clicked it, and it opened up a Windows Explorer window straight to all the screenshots you’d ever taken for that individual game using Steam. Easy! Its other features have always been far less useful to me: I rarely want to upload a screenshot to the Steam Cloud because I do not post on the Steam forums. I do not need to use Steam’s screenshot management window because if I’m taking a screenshot, I just want the dang .jpg, or a whole handful of them, to upload onto this website.
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Now in Steam’s latest beta, clearly pulling in a simplified interface that prioritizes the Steam Deck, the ability to browse to one-click jump to that folder is gone, replaced by a Share button. You also used to be able to right-click an individual image and jump to the file location that way. That’s gone, too. Valve wants you to stay inside Steam for all this stuff now, furthering a trend where all computing happens in an app and barely acknowledges the computer it’s installed on.
Has anything been more of a scourge on computer interfaces this last decade than the Share button? It’s the ultimate “clicking this doesn’t actually do shit, but it does open up a list of other things you can do that used to have their own buttons” bit of obfuscating UI design. Via the Share button, Steam now lets me, one at a time, click “Save image” and choose where to save a screenshot on my computer.
But it’s already on my computer, Valve. Where is it? Where did you put it? WHERE ARE MY FILES!!
The old interface remains in the non-beta branch of Steam for now, but I must implore Valve: bring back your second-best button. Don’t make Steam another casualty of the obfuscation era of interface design. Sometimes The Old Ways are best. I would even accept a return to skeuomorphism if that was the only way to get back the simple click action I crave. Animate your screenshot window rolling open like a file cabinet full of manila folders if that’s what it takes. Just give me back my button!