Last Night’s Steam Outage Has PC Gamers Demanding Better Access To Single-Player Games
Players want to be able to play games even if Steam’s servers are down for maintenance.
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Yesterday, Steam went down for its usual Tuesday maintenance. In most parts of the world, that maintenance was done in roughly an hour, but North America’s servers were down for several hours, preventing most players from accessing the Steam store, their Steam friends list, or any of the games from their Steam library.
And that has a few players a little peeved. One post on the Steam subreddit griped, “It’s 2021 and I can’t even play a single-player game without Steam’s constant, needy as f— internet connection?” Nearly 500 replies echoed that sentiment, while others lamented Steam’s maintenance schedule requiring a complete shutdown of services every Tuesday evening.
A common refrain amongst those replies was to allow players access to single-player games even if Steam is down for maintenance. Steam does have an “offline mode” that detects when the host computer isn’t connected to the web and allows non-online games to be played, but if Steam does detect an internet connection available it will require a handshake with Steam’s servers before allowing the user to access any games from their library, whether they require an online connection to play or not.
This meant that last night’s Steam outage left millions of players unable to play their PC games. Even games with offline mode or alternate login requirements like Elder Scrolls Online were unplayable.
“There is absolutely no reason to not allow users to play INSTALLED games when unable to connect to the steam servers to log in offline,” another Reddit user wrote in a separate post. “Without verification, sure, don’t let them install new content. But if it is ALREADY INSTALLED- it is f—ing ridiculous that you can’t play offline content.”
Steam services seem to have returned to normal by Wednesday morning. But if Steam isn’t going to allow offline play when it goes down for extended maintenance, perhaps Valve can take some advice from SteamDB’s Pavel Djundik and not “update multiple products on the same day so developers don’t have to extinguish multiple fires?”
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/steam-outage-single-player-games/