The more active forums are where most of the problems are. It’s easy to moderate slower smaller discussions, but where Steam really lacks is in those more active forums where basically any game that has any real hype around it will turn into an absolute shitshow, especially if topics like lgbt people or women come up, or if the game happens to attract a really horny incel fandom.

My experience has been far less valuable. The steam forums are typically very poorly moderated, and bigotry runs wild in basically all of them.

It’s not inherent to Steam or forums as a concept, but unless the people running it take care to invest in resources for proper moderation, forums will just naturally trend towards toxic behaviour because it’s easier to be an asshole and harass good people out than it is to do the opposite.

The walkthroughs are great for niche games that don’t have many players, true. But at the same time, it’s not like Steam’s walkthroughs are the only ones or best ones on the Internet. Any game that has enough interest for people to make walkthroughs for are big enough to have a fanbase that maintains a wiki, or a subreddit, or a discord, or some other place where you can exchange the same info. Hell, you could even stay logged into your Steam account in the browser and just look at guides that way, while playing the game itself in another window.

They’re not useless, but if I were to think of the things that keep me using Steam as opposed to using a new launcher (or alternatively, the one thing a new launcher needs to get me to hop over from steam), walkthroughs aren’t really high priority imo.

They took a look at Steam and decided the forums were the big thing missing? The community reviews of games are on some occasion useful, and the steam workshop is great, but the actual forum is just about the most useless feature of Steam I can think of. There are so many places on the Internet to talk about games, chat with people while playing games, post about games, etc.