Steam Downtime Coming at 6 PM Pacific Time

Valve has announced that it plans to take down most of the Steam services at about 6:00 PM Pacific time on August 6. The company is estimating that the downtime will not be longer than three hours, so all the services should be back up by 9:00 PM if all goes according to plan. If there is anything wrong, Valve promises to announce all Steam users in due time.

Valve is saying that the downloading service for games from Steam servers will be unavailable, the Steam Community will be offline and, maybe more crucially, the matchmaking service integrated into Steam will also be unavailable, which means that all those games that rely on it for multiplayer will be down for those three hours. Purchases, even if they are not followed by downloading, are also disabled.

Such downtime is not a problem in itself, as almost all Internet-based services, from Xbox Live to the PlayStation Network to Steam, need regular maintenance and to get new features integrated, which is tough to do while also keeping the service live.

The problem is that such periods during the service is disabled bring into light one of the ugliest truths about digital distribution services and their ilk, the fact that once servers are down, for whatever reason, players are left in the dark.

The music industry is already facing the backlash of users who bought DRM-loaded tracks that cannot be played anymore because activation servers are no longer… active. No one wants to envision a future in which a boatload of games on players' hard drives are unplayable because servers from companies that sold them are out of service.

This is not the case right now and Valve has always been keen on telling users about downtime and any other issues. But, in the future, players might be much more reliant on services like Steam, thus such fears need to be addressed.