MI-80

The Valve Launch Box, used for internal launch parties to get the ball rolling.

Monday at midnight, technically Tuesday morning I suppose, Valve launched their latest blockbuster game, Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2), a zombie apocalypse thriller/shooter focused on four player cooperative play. As with many large Valve launches, the night was not without incident. After over six years in operation, where is Valve and their digital distribution platform, Steam, still failing?

The first major problem was the actual release time. The game was slated for a release at midnight EST, but did not unlock until 1:10AM. Gamers who had pre-loaded the game (that is having paid for and downloaded an encrypted version prior to the release) expected to play the game only minutes after launch. Unfortunately, for many gamers this was not going to be their launch experience.

Steam does not automatically unlock games upon launch. The user must restart Steam, after which it recognizes the game is released and the decryption process may begin. Upon initially restarting Steam it froze, forcing me to end its process via Task Manager. It is my belief now it was in fact not frozen, but just busy without any warning to me or indication of progress. The reason I believe this is that it appears by killing Steam when I did I inadvertently triggered a known bug in Steam.

When I finally got into Steam after several more tries, I found that my “My Games” tab was not displaying any of my games, much less presenting me with the opportunity to unlock Left 4 Dead 2. Instead, the tab sat stuck on “Scanning for Steam games updates...”. After some troubleshooting I found posts stating this is a common issue with Steam and that the solution is to delete the file ClientRegistry.blob in the Steam folder then restart Steam. This did not work, but I noticed another blob file in my Steam directory, AppUpdateStats.blob, which caught my attention, so I deleted it and again; no effect. Finally I tried deleting them both and re-launching Steam, which worked. Finally, at 1:42AM, I could see the game unlocked.

The abundance of gamers having this trouble I found means this is a fundamental flaw in Steam and not a simple bug. Additionally, while I was watching the L4D2 launch chat, I came across many other gamers struggling with the same problem. I posted my fix there and immediately got positive feedback.

At this point I attempted to unlock my game. I got several errors from the servers, from being overloaded and not allowing me to login, to my login token expiring and requiring a re-login. Once I finally got it to accept I owned L4D2, Steam informed me the servers were too busy to authorize my game. So, I sat for a few minutes periodically refreshing the page in an attempt to begin decryption.

At 1:58AM I was finally able to contact an authorization server and attempt to begin decrypting the game. I was dumbfounded when I was instead presented with a file verification prompt that took from 1:58-2:26AM to complete. Luckily, this was a bug; the game had actually been decrypting.

Upon my first attempt to launch I was given an error about having an incomplete installation, so I ran a actual file verification and it did find one corrupt file that it reacquired. This took from 2:28-2:55AM, leaving me ready to play at 2:56AM, or so I thought.

This launch splash screen mocked me for three hours before I could play.

L4D2 threw one final curveball at me. The opening movie performance was horrible, so I alt-tabbed out of the game to ensure I did not leave any CPU intensive applications open, which I had not. I did catch the Windows Firewall prompt asking for permission to let L4D2 to open some ports, which I did. I had noticed something when launching the game though, it said “Completing Installation...” which I had never seen before, so I closed the game to restart it to see if it made any difference.

Upon exiting the game I was presented with a UAC prompt for addoninstaller.exe that was not digitally signed, so I had no idea what it was or who wrote it. I searched online to confirm this was normal, at which point I permitted the executable to run and finally, at 3:07AM, I was able to play L4D2!

Now, Left 4 Dead 2 is an good game, and Steam is a solid platform, but I do have to inquire as to why it falls apart at every major game launch, and why Left 4 Dead 2 had such a rough start. After all, Steam has been around for over six years now and they have released nearly 1,000 games to date.

The underlying design of Steam appears to be part of the problem. Issues with freezing and crashing, real or apparent, are basic design flaws, as is the registry blob error I came across. A failure of backend infrastructure can account for delays in being able to reach an authentication server. Why have these issues not been ironed out over the past six years?

None of these issues are huge, but they do add up to harm the user experience. Especially for a midnight launch where people are staying up late despite work and school the following morning, a three-hour delay is inexcusable. Additionally, every game launches slightly behind schedule; Borderlands went live 30 minutes late, versus L4D2’s 70 minutes. After six years Valve should have ironed this out so midnight meant midnight.

In the end gamers got their games. Some had to do some troubleshooting and many were delayed, but eventually everything worked out. Unfortunately, the damage was done. Angry gamers hit the L4D2 launch chat so hard the servers crashed, and after brought up again Valve moderators locked it temporarily because of what I can only assume was the obscene content coming in. Beyond angry and ”rude” language, gamers were getting creative with ASCII art with things like “EPIC FAIL,” middle fingers, and certain male body parts to show their disdain. Will anyone remember these problems in a few months? Probably not, but why continue to repeat these failures instead of resolve them?