Mac users who play the game Team Fortress 2 have been raging at Valve Corporation as well as Steam for the last 24 hours. Why? A recent upgrade has left them unable to kill each other online in the popular video game. A couple of threads on Steam Forums illustrate their anger. Now the question is, what will Valve and Steam do about it? The thing is that Mac users who play games likely only represent a tiny amount their revenue. So I suspect that Valve and Steam don’t have these issues as a high priority. Therefore, they get the shaft.
Bad move.
Mac users spend a lot on their computers. Therefore it stands to reason that they’d spend a lot on software and games. Chances are that Valve and Steam risk losing customers if this goes on for an extended period of time. It would be in their best interests to at the very least to come clean on how long it will take to fix this, assuming they just can’t fix it quickly.
At the moment, this is truly a #fail for Steam and Valve.
UPDATE: As of 9:46PM EST I am able to play Team Fortress 2 thanks to a Steam client update. Make that three in the last two hours, but not really. It looks like the same update being forced on Steam client users over and over again. Clearly they’re trying to react to the situation, but they seem to be doing it badly. Wow. What a #fail.
UPDATE #2: The constant updating problem now seems to be fixed.
UPDATE #3: So far this Sunday, my Steam client has updated to the same version twice. #fail
Steam Was Down… Was It Attacked?
Posted in Commentary with tags Steam on December 23, 2016 by itnerdValve’s Steam service was down for about 2.5 hours today. That means you weren’t playing any games, or buying anything using the service. The timing sucked for Steam as this happened at the start of their Winter Sale. Plus they’ve also started voting on the Steam Awards.
Predictably, people took to Twitter to express their views:
But at 1:40 PM EST, it came back up. Thus you can go back to pwning your competition over the holidays. Though there are rumors that Steam was attacked as per these Tweets from a hacker who goes by the name Cripthepoodle, who claimed to be once part of the PoodleCorp hacker group as well as tweet from the Phantom Squad hacker group. Both have apparently threatened wide spread DDoS attacks over the holidays aimed at Steam, Xbox Network and PlayStation Network:
In case you’re wondering why the last Tweet is a screen grab, it’s because Phantom Squad’s Twitter feed has been suspended by Twitter.
Now this sort of thing isn’t new. Lizard Squad did it in 2014 and brought Xbox Network and PlayStation Network down for a week. Last year, Steam was taken down for three days or so.
I’ll be monitoring this to see if additional attacks come in the next few days.
Leave a comment »