One of Steam’s largest debaucles ended 2015. On Christmas day, lots of personal information was leaked. People who logged into Steam during a brief period had their information exposed due to what was initially described as a caching issue, but later revealed as the result of a DoS attack. Full names, addresses, phone number digits, and the last few credit card numbers were revealed randomly. This was the initial problem. The bigger problem is that it took five days for Valve to say anything about the attack.
Valve only brought up the Christmas issue on December 30. Yes, the Steam store was shut down as soon as possible after the 11:50am-1:30pm PST leak was discovered, but it took days before the company released any official statement about what happened and the sorts of information leaked. This is unacceptable. Especially since, as of January 3, no follow-up had occurred. Valve promised to contact the estimated 34,000 people hit by the attack, but we aren’t hearing about aid and compensation offered.
This is unacceptable. Any other company or distributor with customer service like this would have been run through. People would have boycotted. Lawsuits would have been filed. There would be extensive outcry. But, because this is Steam and the Steam Winter Sale is on, people don’t seem to be taking it seriously. Instead, people seem to just be tolerating it. They shouldn’t.
People need to be mad about this, even if they weren’t personally affected by the issue. They could have been. A platform like Steam shouldn’t be this susceptible. Five days for a response isn’t right.
Especially since this Christmas day debacle ties into a larger issue that’s been present with Steam for years. Support is constantly lacking. I’ve had the same issue with Steam sales every year since 2013. Whenever I make too many purchases for friends in a row, my account seems to lock up and future purchases won’t go through for a day or two. Even if I put in a support ticket, the issue resolves itself before I even hear anything from Steam.
Valve is known for never being particularly responsive or prompt with support. We’ve seen this happen repeatedly with minor problems. If the refund process wasn’t automated, we’d see it there too. Now, with this Christmas day problem, we’ve seen Valve will take an inappropriately large amount of time to handle major problems with important, personal information.
Instead of blindly continuing to buy from the company, we should all be holding it accountable. People should be emailing Valve for answers, because if enough people do it and stick to their guns, there has to be an appropriate response. Changes will have to be made, especially if the company really wants Steam Machines to succeed.