Funny enough, as we speak, I am downloading an update for a game. It failed for some unknown reason the first time and tried redownloading now. Time will tell if it will finally "just work" or if I'll have to redownload the entire game. Before you ask, yes I am on an SSD with plenty of space and I have a pretty decent fiber internet connection.
I did have to reinstall cyberpunk 2077 on GoG multiple times but that was largely because I tried some mods.
But steam on any of my PC's, laptops and now steam deck has never failed me. sorry to hear about your experience and Thx for sharing!
Sure, whenever I fucked around with mods too much or when migrating between windows installs. Never from something I cleanly installed with Steam.
Like, I’ll do the above less than once a year.
Have you ever tried to reproduce this on a different ISP or even hotspot? Wired vs wireless? Maybe there's some transmission corruption going on over the wire that's only caught during final validation? (And thus having to redownload chunks much later instead of inline)
One thing that happens is some games keep config files in their game directory instead of using a host OS user directory and thus those games will fail validation after any configuration change.
Combine that with mods that break games, but the mod files aren't in the manifest and thus invisible to validation, can create scenarios where users are doing repeated full validations and still having issues.
[1] https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader/blob/master/Depot...
I've been using Steam for a long time, I do not recall any time that I have had to do this except when I was manually messing around with files and needed to reacquire the originals.