Trying to send a sticker in Steam Chat burned through a month of mobile data
74 comments
·July 18, 2025Fogest
spondyl
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)
ASalazarMX
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.
Fogest
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.
OsrsNeedsf2P
People give React far too much credit.
Source: I've had the privilege to ask questions to some of the engineers on that team...
benoau
I wonder wtf is in the 200+ megabyte installer that has to download every other day if not the data the store needs...
ASalazarMX
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.
Ekaros
Downloading the same browser engine that everyone else uses too time and time again as more bugs and security issues are found in it...
esseph
Try the steam website and see if you have the same problem?
Fogest
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.
esseph
Have you moved to a different locality since you've had a steam account?
Steam -> Settings -> Download -> Region
LorenDB
Why are ISPs apparently limiting some plans to just 1 GB of data? That's not nearly enough for 2025.
Rygian
Lack of real market choice for consumers.
pavon
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.
ThatMedicIsASpy
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.
toast0
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
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.
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gylterud
Not downvoting, but any typical online activity during commute or while travelling will blow through 1GB. Music every day, or a video once in a while…
I also have WiFi at my usual hangs, but thus far this month I am on 15GB of my 50GB monthly plan. Sure I could pre download music or videos to watch, but it would be much more of a hassle. And some sites, like twitch, don’t really have an option to download.
dbspin
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
I get 150GB for €8 in Italy but my ISP is trying to convince me to move to 200GB/€10.
ThatMedicIsASpy
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
jorvi
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.
keyringlight
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).
jorvi
No, it's Valve just not giving a hoot.
People don't seem to (want to) remember, but before the run-up to the Steam Deck, Valve was really coasting.
Big Picture was riddled with bugs. Controller configuration was riddled with bugs. The Steam in-game overlay was terrible, and had been terrible for years. Their internal browser was a custom stripped down 5+ years old Electron or Chromium Embedded Framework monstrosity, begging to be exploited somehow. Chat and voice chat was terrible, didn't scale properly and was missing many of the features of things like Discord.
And things had been stagnant like that for 7 years, if not more. Their built-in browser and chat functions are still terrible. In regards to chat and voice, I hope they cave and add Discord integration, so we finally have one service for PC, Xbox and Playstation.
Their store was and is still all webviews, the pages themselves are terribly optimized and many of them aren't even controllable on the Deck without touch. You read that right, the Big Picture cursor doesn't work on some store pages, which renders them unusable on handhelds without a touchscreen / hardware (emulated) mouse.
Steam is miles ahead of the Epic or GoG UX, but it still has lots of warts.
Steam Input controller bind customization is off-the-map nuts with how broad it is now though, major props for that. And the 'new' Big Picture is a vast improvement.
Ekaros
Also Valve has relatively small workforce. That being only couple hundred. With good part working on two of the most popular games. And then other projects. In the end they don't have that much idle hands.
stefan_
Just scrolling up and down on this loads another 30MiB every cycle. No visible change.
msgodel
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.
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Am4TIfIsER0ppos
I had to learn that same lesson with Civ 5.
autoexec
what is the point of a digital sticker? What are you supposed to stick it to?
ang_cire
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:
ascagnel_
At one point, your Counter-Strike guns.
autoexec
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.
vel0city
Can't really run mods if you're on official matchmaking servers. Even if you did modify the textures locally, those textures wouldn't show up for everyone else. A part of this is so other people can see the skins/stickers/farkles you've added to your gun collection.
leshokunin
Would you say you were delighted?
ars
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.
micromacrofoot
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.
Ekaros
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...
micromacrofoot
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.
dsizzle
fwiw the substack app did this to me too
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tschellenbach
[flagged]
HaZeust
Might want to work on your sentiment analysis platform, this is about Steam by Valve
tomstockmail
Steam by Valve, the gaming company.
smittywerben
For context, Steam has never really supported mobile devices for using the Steam store. It kind of makes sense if you think about it.
mopenstein
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.
haunter
>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
daedrdev
Gacha are also unregulated digital gambling, I think steam was simply the first
steelbrain
I’m out of the loop here. What does gambling here refer to? Is it the Steam trading cards?
Ekaros
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
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.
hombre_fatal
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.
Rohansi
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.
esseph
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.
morsch
There's a Steam app that's basically the store?
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null
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.