My love/hate relationship with Steam

I play quite a few online games, and those which are the most fun are on Steam. At first I hated Steam, since it was yet-another account I had to sign-up for, and required me to be online to play my games. It has come a long way since the early days, and has grown to be the main distribution method for games. Indie developers are able to make their games available to millions of people without having to package or ship any cardboard boxes. Think of how many trees have been saved! I love that new content is continually added to the game I bought a year ago. Team Fortress 2 feels fresh, and Steam is able to deliver it without me having to download and apply countless patches manually.

Unfortunately this automation comes with a price- last night I wanted to play TF2, but could not because of a bug in the Heavy Update. In the old world I would simply roll-back to a previous release, but Steam does not allow that... and I'd be out of sync with the servers.

What was the bug? It didn't actually show up until after I had played the new version for an hour and exited the game. When trying to launch the game again, it failed because it didn't like this file c:\program files (x86)\steam\YourUserName\steamapps\tf\tf2_playerstats.dmx Simply deleting it fixes the issue. I found the details the following morning, here.

How does a bug like this get past QA? Sure this was a tricky one, but in reading through that thread, you'll see that likely thousands of people were affected by this. Most have Nvidia graphics cards like mine, but I saw some ATI references as well. Some are using Vista, some XP. It seems to me that this release was rushed. What for? It's not like this patch is bringing in more direct revenue for Valve, so why release something that hasn't been fully tested? Why risk breaking my favorite game to add a few new bells and whistles. TF2 was rendered useless and I spent the rest of my evening trying to fix it.

I realize that a QA department cannot catch every error, but I feel like this one could have been prevented had the release not been rushed. As PC gamers, are we too forgiving when a game is buggy? Do we have lower expectations than console gamers? Maybe Valve expects the world to be their QA department. They run some quick checks, but all regression is performed by the end user. If that's the case I'd just like to know ahead of time.

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