I’ve been keeping a list in my head for ages of things I’d love to see Steam bring about and make available for people to use. This post is basically a list of those things put to digital paper.

Each thing will be described to the best of my ability, and will not strictly be taking practicality into consideration, but they should all be reasonably possible.

  • Allow the User (or the community) to specify a directory from which to syncronize save files for games where the developer did not actually set the directory themselves, and enable save sync. This would be fantastic for older titles like Grand Theft Auto 3/VC/SA where RockStar has never bothered to configure it.
  • Enable saving a Diff of a Games Files, specifically to enable easier 3rd party modding. Unlimited Local Diff’s, with a limited number of remote diffs, with a file size limit set per game. Maybe some way to specify your own repo for diffs so you can effectively have unlimited space? The goal of this is to allow you to mod a game, IE GTA SA, to support widescreen, restore the music, add back the missing lighting effects, all kinds of things of that nature, and then synchronize that across all of their clients, or have it survive reinstalling the operating system the user is using.
  • Cloud Storage! I’d love it if Valve had some kind of Cloud Storage solution for general storage. It doesn’t need to offer downloads of those files for other people, but just having a place I can stick files and know they’ll be fine and syncronized between machines would be fantastic. This one in particular I can understand why valve might resist it, as it’s a very expensive proposition even giving every steam user 5GB of storage - That’s a LOT of space. Maybe put it behind a purchase? SteamDrive, $10 for 10GB, forever.
  • Queued Purchases! Let me go to a game, indicate how much I want to pay for said game, give valve the money, and when that game eventually hits that price, it’s automatically purchased, and if any money is left over, returned to my Steam Wallet.
  • Gnome on the SteamDeck. I own a SteamDeck, I run Bazzite on it because honestly the Gnome experience is better, though that might just be that I am more familiar with Gnome than KDE in my day-to-day. Gnome <3
  • Remember what tab I set to default across devices. You can set it per device to go to Library instead of Store, but you can’t set it to go to Library on first login.
  • Theme API! Give us back a nice clean way to theme the client especially on the Deck, so we don’t have to install Decky! As much as I love Decky, having first party support for that would be fantastic.
  • Overlay API! Let me write code in some form that Steam will dynamically load into their own overlay, so adding a button along the bottom, so I can do silly shit like integrate a YouTube player or Telegram or Discord or Mastodon.
  • Steam Controller Firmware Updates… Please add a button to flash Steam Controllers to the last available firmware. The current solution is very lackluster. You have to track down and download a zip file from the Steam Forums that flashes the controller, and the thread has 2 links, one of them is wrong and doesn’t work, it’s a shit show. Fix this please.
  • “Steam Audio” as it exists right now is an API that enables games to sound better, but I want “Steam Audio” like Steam Input - Let me configure Mic and Speakers and Headphones and what goes where for applications running under Steam.

I’ll add and remove from this list as stuff happens over time.

Have a great day!