I have no problems at all with Steam. I couldn't play a multiplayer game of Chaos Rising the other day. So I shrugged and did something else. Steam isn't perfect and there will be downtime - but people like Locky who blow out a few veins because they can't play a game are, frankly, idiots.
well.. not really.
when youve been at work all day and have free`d up some gaming time from the family or perhaps usual chores and fire up your VERY expensive constantly needing $$$ and updates top end pc the one thing you want is to be able to play your games.. y'know the ones you have paid for
an offline mode is welcome TBH, if you have payed for games an run through steam and the game is locked to steam then why can they let you play when its offline?
seriously there was 2.4 million people on steam the other day, the number is growing.
steam / valve are making money on every one of the 2.4 million purchases over the recent months more and more money right?
and so is each download can make between £1 or £0.50P then there making about £20million a year if not more.
now ive worked on servers and systems and have experience of 24hr services that need to be maintained such as the health care industry and its not impossible to have planned changes where your primary servers keep the strain whilst you secondary are updated..
furthermore power issues can be largely contained also.
so they have the resources to have a huge VMware cluster or massive multiple SAN`s etc.. with FULL multiple redundancies
why should it go down at all?
My opinion is that valve are going to have to accept that they are now a massive successful multinational company (bit like an online tesco`s) and need to behave and adapt to this new resizing of their organization instead of acting like a software house.