Tychos right (which he should be more of)

[Skaven]

I was thinking about content delivery last night while watching the Pepsi Billionaire thing last night (fruits of my labor). About how great digital content delivery can be/is. How you can get HDTV movies on demand and such. And thought about how Steam is in its infancy and needs the kinks worked out.

Then I read Holkins last comment on Penny Arcade this morning and had to agree: It doesn't matter. It's out of beta, and if I can't talk my mother through it over the phone... well, whatever.

I think there's a lot of promise for Steam, and I wish more things could be delivered in a similar fashion.

 

[Slash]

They underestimated the amount of demand. They are working 24/7 to "fix it" which probably means adding a shitload of content servers.

You have to remember this is a lot different than HDTV or something... Valve has to go to companies and say "We want to use a ton of your bandwith for our non-yet released program and you get a little bit of advertising space in return". These companies don't know if this is a good or not- What if Steam is a huge flop? It's a waste of bandwidth. I mean if Steam was like HDTV or something, then I'm sure people would be throwing their bandwidth at Valve saying "PLEASE TAKE MY BANDWIDTH" because they knew 3847289304 gamers would see their little advertising.

Valve will fix it. If they knew the demand was going to be this high, they wouldn't have released it in this state. And I think 99% of the problems with Steam right now are lack of bandwidth. If there was enough bandwidth people wouldn't be getting all these weird crashes and freeze-ups. The program itself works fine as long as there is enough bandwidth.

I'm 100% sure Valve will correct the problem very soon, and players wanting to buy HL2 via Steam will be confident they will get the game at a quick rate.