When comparing Steam vs Slant, the Slant community recommends Steam for most people. In the question“What are the best mobile apps for community product recommendation's?” Steam is ranked 2nd while Slant is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Steam is:
Over 125 million users actively use Steam, with over 15,000 games to choose from.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Biggest digital distribution platform for games
Over 125 million users actively use Steam, with over 15,000 games to choose from.
Pro Steam sales
Steam has daily and weekend sales as well as publisher sales, though their biggest sales are their winter and summer sales. Steam is known for their deep discounts (discounts on games range from 10% to 95%) on games and has pushed many other stores to do the same seeing Amazon and other storefronts match their pricings when sales go up as well as hold their own seasonal sales.
Pro Cloud save games
Sharing save games between Mac and Windows machine is pretty nice though the game has to be a Steamworks game in order to have this feature.
Pro Support for cross-platform games
Most games that have a Mac and Linux version available can be found on Steam.
Pro Wide selection
There are a variety of games from indie to AAA. There is a curated list and even classic games.
Pro Gift games
Users can gift games to their friends, which is great for when there are sales as one friend can pick up games for the rest of his friends cheaply. There is often 4 packs of a single game that can be picked up to easily gift to 3 other friends as well.
Pro Offers refunds for games that haven't been played for more than 2 hours
If you stop playing a game within the first 2 hours, you can ask for a refund.
Pro Fast downloads
Steam has excellent servers and their download speeds tend to be the best out of any digital store online.
Pro Steam achievements
Most games on Steam have achievements. It's also nice that you can see how many people who own/play the game finished a particular achievement.
Pro Steam Workshop
Steam Workshop makes it easy to create and/or find mods and extra content for games that support it.
Pro Active community
The community frequently helps solve questions, review games, and make great content via Workshop.
Pro Integrated VoIP client
Text based chat and VoIP chat are both included with your client. Of course this only works with people on the stream platform.
Pro Compares options while taking context into consideration
Context such as purpose, limitations, and situations change what options should be recommended and what pros and cons should be surfaced. For example, a comparison of Linux distributions for general use and Linux distributions for development will discuss the topics in different ways.
Pro Content can be easily kept up to date
Since anyone can edit content on the site, the pace at which information changes are reflected on the site is not arbitrarily limited by the number of writers the site has.
Pro Multiple chosen answers
Subjective questions may have more than one answer. Slant allows people to vote for more than one answer as being correct, and to append the pros and cons which influenced their decision to their vote; thus giving a context of in which situations each answer may be considered correct.
Pro Public visibility
You do not need to have an account to view existing content (questions or answers). People can see what they're getting into before deciding if they'd like to sign up for an account and contribute to the site.
Pro Pro/con association
When upvoting existing answers, you can associate the pros and cons which influenced your choice of chosen answer(s).
Pro Community rated answers
Unlike a number of other Q&A sites where the person asking the question picks the winning answer, Slant accepts that they're asking because they don't know the answer, so they allow everyone in the community to pitch in by upvoting the best answer.
Pro Designed for subjective questions
Slant.co's reason for being is to answer subjective questions. It was born with the knowledge that other sites existed to handle objective questions and answers, but they made no attempt to handle the intricacies of subjective answers. Slant.co is the only site focused on solving this specific area.
Pro See all answers clearly
An enumeration of recommendations is easily viewed as a list, making it a good starting point for researching available options. This is the opposite of other sites in which multiple choices may be listed within a single answer, with the need for the user to read through paragraphs of information to pick out the key articles.
Pro Pros and cons vs users' answers
Most Q&A sites give each user the chance to give an answer (sometimes multiple answers). A lot of the content of each user's answers will overlap, resulting in duplication of information (thus more to read), or information being lost in noise (e.g. if someone sees existing answers and adds a missing point without copying existing information, their point will likely languish at the bottom of the list of answers as it did not answer the majority of the question).
Slant approaches this differently; rather than focusing on the users, it focuses on the points; Pros and Cons. Any user may amend the information in a pro/con, may vote based on how much that pro/con influenced their decision, and may add their own pros and cons if certain points are missing from the canon.
Pro Unbiased information you can trust
Slant isn't financially tied to any products listed on it. All the categories (organized into 'questions'), products (organized as 'options'), and pros/cons are added, and edited by real users - there is no way for a company to pay to have a favorable review (and if they try to do it themselves, the community can report (flag) or edit any false claims.
Pro Subjective claims have to be backed up with evidence
Each subjective statement needs to be backed up with objective information. An opinion has to be backed up with facts. An evidence for a claim on Slant can be provided with examples, sources, and facts.
Cons
Con Lots of DRM
Many games are not only Steam DRM protected but by another DRM system. It just cries for something to go wrong.
Con Little support for older titles
Many older titles (10-15 years or more) are no longer supported and thus require much manual tinkering to run properly on windows 10, requiring digging though forums and trying many things. Compare that to GoG where these titles often run out-of-the-box.
Con Lots of junky games and violated content
They never clean up their store and they post nudity content on their store.
Con Company actively self-sabotaging
Valve have ripped off bad launcher design from competing stores instead of sticking with the better design they already had. Strong negative response including multiple customers suffering medical issues is being ignored instead of taken on board.
Con Support is an epic fail
EA Help has more positive feedback regarding their support than Steam.
Con Buggy client on Linux with little customer support
Linux support is generally overlooked. It is recommended to disable in-game overlay and to use a real browser to interact with steampowered's website. Basic library access works usually without a hitch.
Also do not expect real tech support on Linux. Forum questions of bugs often go unattended and unanswered.
Con Pricey
AAA titles are very pricey, very often more expensive than at other online stores and sometimes brick & mortar ones.
Con Games cost a fortune on the official Steam store
Buy keys from other shops, never on the official store.
Con Requires to log into Steam every 2 weeks
Steam forces you to periodically log into Steam Store every two weeks, or your games will stop working. They will force you to keep adding the API number, which is a pain. There is an Offline Mode, but you still have to log in at least once every two weeks.
Con Unknown in the public and bad SEO
Journalists and the public don't know about it
Con Tech content focused
Con Pros and Cons don't travel from question to question
If you see a new question and choose to add an option already recommended in another question, you need to add all pros and cons from scratch.
Con Doesn't work properly without JavaScript
Con Anyone can modify content
Luckily some of the Slant community members are quick to react and report abuse.