Legit question - did steam ever have downtime?
Yes plenty of times (I've had a steam account for ages). But generally most games still work completely fine - and some of them even work with multiplayer.
This is usually provided you've played them at least once so the license shit gets sorted. They also occasionally have regional downtime too. And sometimes the friends/messaging stuff won't connect or doesn't work properly (but the rest of Steam works fine)
They also don't try to take over your entire computer by trying to online register your fucking blu-ray drive by serial number like it appears Sony was doing. So even if you install a new motherboard and processor or graphics card Steam will still work fine.
Is it perfect? No, definitely not. But they do have a great balance between being a commercial, profitable company and also respecting the customers - their no questions asked refund policy for if you've played a game for under 2 hours is brilliant.
What you have to keep in mind though is that Steam basically invented the concept of the online software storefront. They were literally the pioneers and a bunch of other tech companies followed in their footsteps (including Adobe software). In the first year of Steam and Half Life 2 (which forced a Steam account requirement) it was disastrous and lots of people were super pissed off due to frequent downtime and dial-up users having issues but Valve kept going and had a clear vision/mission and struck a great balance with their userbase.
There's plenty of Valve haters but for the most part they built a brilliant marketplace that people
actually want to use - there's plenty of games that I don't even bother with if they're not on Steam - once the other publishers and developers saw Steam's success they tried to fucking copy it (of course) making their own generic, shitty, buggy as fuck "launchers" and marketplaces. This is the same problem Netflix faced well after Steam did (when every other movie studio decided they would try to get a slice of Netflix's pie). But Valve not only set the standard of online software (game) distribution and purchasing but made customers for the most part feel respected.
They've had tremendous sales and deals that have made it actually worth spending time on their platform - Sony on the other hand I don't think really have any appreciation of how important their customers are. As a good example: instead of nickel-and-diming customers for re-releases or platform changes for the same fucking game, Half Life 2 just had some significant updates and as it was the 20th anniversary instead of putting on a sale they just gave the game away for free for anyone who didn't yet have it for a few days. That's because Valve knows they would be nothing without their customers/staff and they already made tons of fucking money from Half Life 2
- we all know Sony and Nintendo would release a new console and release effectively the same game and probably put a $60 pricetag on it.
The problem with Sony and Nintendo by comparison is sort of a culture and conflict of interest one. They're both very old companies and they're both heavily incentivized to put out hardware that they have full control of while Valve embraces and actually wants PC gamers to have a proper and fairly open PC gaming experience.
I don't think Sony and Nintendo realize just how fucked they are or maybe they do. They're both on the road to becoming either irrelevant or only being able to be game developers while Steam ends up becoming a dominant platform.
