Gamers grumble over Steam outage
Play postponed
Steam users are venting frustration at Valve after an outage stopped gamers from accessing their downloaded titles.
Many users struggled to launch games, both in online and offline modes, and the Steam forums became overloaded with complaints, many blaming yesterday's client update for their woes.
According to Valve, though, the issues are to do with a "hardware failure in a server rack", rather than anything directly related to the update.
The company is investigating the problem, it said.
Yesterday, it was revealed that the Steam client had broke the 5m concurrent user mark. ®
Thanks to Greg for the tip
COMMENTS
What?!
A single hardware failure can take out their entire business... Nicely played Valve!
What?!
"A single hardware failure can take out their entire business... Nicely played Valve!"
More frightening, a single business failure could take out a large chuck of your games collection.
Annoying, but there's a simple workaround:
Don't buy Steam games.
Wrong idea
The original concept of Steam was to be able to activate and deliver games to computers. This would cut down on pirating and allow users to always migrate their games from old to new computers. However, requiring Steam as a launch platform and/or requiring activation on each launch is the dumbest idea I've ever seen. After all the hacking and issues SONY went through last year, maybe it is time to rethink this whole process. For starters, offline mode should be the default. Having the client only run when a game that requires it is launched would be a good followup.
More and more games are using steam as their method of distribution. I understand why, and I agree with it in principle but in it's current form it will always be the single point of failure for all games bought through it.
Steam Offline Mode
Steam Offline Mode was always stupid because you needed to be online to set it.
E.g. In a situation where the service suddenly goes offline, you can't then set it to work offline to continue playing even single player games.
