Haven't seen one of those threads on GOG.

For me, Steam keeps popping up momentarily then losing connection again. So, as far as I'm concerned, it's still down.

The Steam Concurrent Users stats page is showing that it's still not fully functional and the Steam homepage is currently showing "334,057 Gamers online" which is very low being as this is usually around 3 million at this time of day.

Not a thread perse, but people are always telling others how much they like it.

Wait, what? Working fine on my end, games, chat, community et al. Could be a city thing.

Can't comment on purchasing, since I ain't buying anything. Also, the same thing can hit any online game seller, including this site. Which is WHY you backup your installers.

My guess like others on the thread, is to do with the upcoming Christmas sale and, let's face it, the strain it going to put on their servers.

Yay, the weekly dose of Steam FUD is here again.

When this started happening, I was happily running around New Vegas in regular Steam online mode. Guess what? Steam community disconnected and... nothing happened. I didn't even notice.

Then I quit the game. Looked at the GOG forums. Steam's down, they say? Oh yes, community's offline. Let's try... Bastion. Steam crunches for a while, then informs me that it can't synchronise with the cloud, but I may play anyway. Game runs, hooray! Leave game. Come back to forums. After 15 minutes, try launching New Vegas. And it runs, too.

I'm not denying life would be better without any umbilical cords to servers anywhere, but I honestly don't see what's the big deal with what's going on today.

I'm happy for you if you can run offline but I'm not able to.

It's not a planned thing by the way, it's been confirmed by valve staff as "unscheduled maintenance".

It's been going on for over 5 hours now which is the longest by far in all the time I've been on steam.

And yes, gog.com's servers could go down too, but that wouldn't affect your ability to play the games you'd already downloaded and installed.

So wait, even the single player mode wouldn't work?

That's... odd. Really odd.

Anyway, I'm guessing the main problem here is that they're getting the servers ready for the Christmas sale.

Some games just don't work, single player or multi if steam is not running in online mode. MW3 is one example. I got stuck in the middle of a steam cloud update, unable to get into offline mode though.

You're lucky. I have to be online to go into offline mode in Steam, most of the time.

Well, I "go offline" after installing or downloading something, so I would be online at the time by default. Keeping it offline stops Steam from messing with anything when you don't need a connection, so that's what I do and suggest for others who don't use the online features.

Btw. OP is talking about GOG' using wisdom because clearly he forgotten about GOG's prank when the whole site disappeared and they announced they are closing gog for good :P

AFAIK if the game is in the midst of downloading an update, you will not be able to play it at all even in offline mode.

Well, that is hardly surprising.

It seems that still not everyone has learned to make personal backups of games they've bought, or else it doesn't really matter if you use Steam or GOG or whatever service there is.

The only way to fully embrace the glory of DRM-freeness is to BACKUP YOUR GAMES LOCALLY! ;)

GOG just thought that gamers KNEW this when they took the site offline. They clearly overestimated the average gamer, it seems... :P