At least with GOG this would never happen (at long as you save your games locally), but the GOG catalog is way smaller than Steam's.
Get falsely VAC banned? They'll detect this and know exactly what happened and revert the issue. Have your account hijacked? They'll trace exactly what happens and fix it all up. Not to mention that this change triggered the standard 'you can't trade or market any games/items on your account for 7 days' block, so even when someone takes your account you don't actually lose anything.
Valve makes some incredibly bad bugs in their software (games as well as Steam itself), but at least they track and trace everything so they can unwind their screw-ups.
Well for the recent but on Steam Linux that erased your hard drive if you moved the Steam library folder somewhere else, there was nothing they could do to "unwind their screw-ups", except fixing it in the code once the damage was done.
Warning:
The uninstallation process deletes the folder Steam was
installed to to ensure it is fully uninstalled. If you accidentally
installed Steam to a folder containing other data, for example
C:\Program Files\ instead of C:\Program Files\Steam\, STOP!
Link to said bug: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671
Hah, maybe if you're lucky enough to actually hit a human. Valve has ludicrously terrible support. There have been tons of reports of 1-2 week wait times after submitting a ticket, only to receive an automated response with nothing to do with the actual ticket (even experienced this myself a few times, not fun).
People are quick to praise valve but I don't think it's truly deserved anymore. Sadly the days of them caring about their products and communities are long gone..
To be fair, Valve is probably not fit to have proper consumer support since they are still a very small company (with a HUGE customer base). Unless they decide to invest in headcounts to have proper support, that is.
checked with what? Valve is not a public company nobody actually knows how MUCH they earn. you can only estimate it.
> not some small-scale startup
They are very small scale in terms of employees numbers. Check your facts.
> They could easily build out a quality support infrastructure but choose not to.
For that statement, I agree with you.
[1] - https://www.linkedin.com/company/13922?trk=tyah&trkInfo=clic...
> That's not a small company by any stretch
Please, give me more examples of billion dollars companies which have only 500 employees.
It'd be easy to go on. And I'd bet there's no way Valve is just a $1 billion company.
> At any reasonable estimate of Valve's revenue and valuation multiples, they're easily a billion dollar company
bluejellybean was clearly not disputing that their current headcount is low. Their point was that a billion-dollar company is not "small-scale," no matter what their headcount is. Check your own facts before you get snippy.
The days of caring never really existed in the first place.
I'm pretty sure I was hit by a bug during the recent sales event and submitted a ticket, but to this day never heard back. Their human-based support is Google-level bad.
That said, that's just their web app; getting issues fixed in games is MUCH slower.
I know people who got banned for having debuggers open not attached to the game.
The VAC system is also incredibly intrusive. It was scanning random processes on my computer, and I know this because when I tried to recompile my program, it failed because it couldn't delete the executable because Steam had an open handle on it...
You would never hear about Valve failing in these cases because no random person would trust testimony from random people over Valve.
I'm pretty sure that if I got access to your account and got your account banned, you'd be SOL.
On the other hand, VAC bans now only affect the single game that the cheat was used in, so your entire Steam library won't be trashed. Exceptions to this include early Source games (e.g. cheating in CS:S will get you banned in TF2) and HL engine games (e.g. CS 1.6 ban also affects DoD)
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7849-RAD...
They've reversed several waves of bans, with a number listed here [2] that you can follow the links through on if you feel like doing so. It's very rare but it happens.
[1]: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6633-TAN... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat#False-positiv...
How so?
If by DRM you mean the game won't boot up without an internet connection check, then no, most games do not require the internet to run. Even GTAV loads up fine in offline mode. As it should.
Even Ubisoft's Uplay and Origin clients have offline modes.
Games which require the internet to load up, even though they have single player modes, deserve a thumbs down. Steam has an offline mode, and game publishers should respect that.