[Entwickler]

While it's amazing they've got as big as they have, I have to say I'm utterly disappointed with the quality of the steam interface.

Trying to watch friend's streams breaks half the time, files often get corrupted for downloads, and feels like every other week they change the UI layout.

[Semaphor]

I don’t care about streaming, I never had a corrupted download and have been using steam pretty much since it existed, and the recent UI change (not a fan, though, it’s now slower than before) was the first big one in years.

[Entwickler]

You've never had to "verify the integrity of game cache" either? Wow, you must be lucky - 3-4 of the friends I play with have to do that quite often.

Funny enough, as we speak, I am downloading an update for a game. It failed for some unknown reason the first time and tried redownloading now. Time will tell if it will finally "just work" or if I'll have to redownload the entire game. Before you ask, yes I am on an SSD with plenty of space and I have a pretty decent fiber internet connection.

[NikolaNovak]

That is fascinating to me! It challenges my assumption based on personal experience - I think I had to repair a game once in more than a decade (dirt rally 2, and it's possible I did something to muck it up).

I did have to reinstall cyberpunk 2077 on GoG multiple times but that was largely because I tried some mods.

But steam on any of my PC's, laptops and now steam deck has never failed me. sorry to hear about your experience and Thx for sharing!

[Semaphor]

> You've never had to "verify the integrity of game cache" either?

Sure, whenever I fucked around with mods too much or when migrating between windows installs. Never from something I cleanly installed with Steam.

[NamTaf]

I so rarely have to verify integrity or have a download error out that I’m honestly suspicious of your hardware.

Like, I’ll do the above less than once a year.

[smileybarry]

It's been years since I last had corrupted downloads, and I think that was back when Steam used its own download protocol, off colocated Valve-owned mirror servers. As of some years back it's all HTTP-based[1] now and off Akamai CDN IIRC. (I don't mean to say "works on my machine" but trying to theorize why it's so common for you while saying why it's generally more stable nowadays)

Have you ever tried to reproduce this on a different ISP or even hotspot? Wired vs wireless? Maybe there's some transmission corruption going on over the wire that's only caught during final validation? (And thus having to redownload chunks much later instead of inline)

1: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamPipe

[Brybry]

Even chunks are checksummed. Or at least they are in third party implementations. [1]

One thing that happens is some games keep config files in their game directory instead of using a host OS user directory and thus those games will fail validation after any configuration change.

Combine that with mods that break games, but the mod files aren't in the manifest and thus invisible to validation, can create scenarios where users are doing repeated full validations and still having issues.

[1] https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader/blob/master/Depot...

[TheFreim]

> You've never had to "verify the integrity of game cache" either?

I've been using Steam for a long time, I do not recall any time that I have had to do this except when I was manually messing around with files and needed to reacquire the originals.

[Sander_Marechal]

Steam downloads are so terribly slow. I can suck down 100Gb during a cup of coffee using my browser, bittorrent or even the (yuck) Epic Game Store. But with Steam it takes multiple hours. I have tried to diagnose the problem but as far as I can tell it's because Steam uses really aggressive compression and they process each block as it is downloaded. This causes the download to stall and wait for the CPU to catch up.

[naavis]

Curious. I have been getting full download speeds from Steam with no issues.

[gwill]

strange, i was hitting ~20mbps when downloading armored core vi.

[muzani]

If anything, it looks pretty damn good for something 20 years old. Facebook, Reddit, and Google haven't aged well. HN isn't even 20 and feels much older.