Does Steam Eat Games?

As a devout PC gamer, I’ve come to love Valve’s Steam platform over the years. The main reason is one I could sum up simply as “ultimate convenience”. About 90% of the games I play in a given year are available on Steam, and because of that, I simply couldn’t imagine using another solution. Once you’re spoiled with that kind of convenience, it’s hard to look elsewhere.

But, as much as I love Steam, I’ll be the first to admit that it has its own host of problems. I can’t recall the number of times I’ll have the client go “Not Responding”, and after events that occurred a couple of days ago, I’m starting to wonder if Valve doesn’t feed Steam enough, because it seems to have been eating my games.

It all started with my brother’s PC, and his install of Grand Theft Auto IV. The GTAIV.exe process started when the game was launched, but quickly would kill itself off. We thought it could have been Games for Windows Live, but after multiple reinstalls, no cigar. Being that he had Borderlands installed, which also uses GFWL, we gave it a shot… and it also didn’t load.

The issue there is even stranger than the one with GTA IV. We re-verified the game, and it was found out that 4GB of the install was missing. Given that we just played the game together two days earlier, the fact that it was missing 4GB simply made no sense. So after all this, I decided to try GTA IV on my own PC… surprise surprise, it also didn’t work. It had the same issue as my brother’s install.

During all of this, we both re-verified our respective game and nothing was ever fixed. Fed up, we re-downloaded the entire thing from scratch, and sure enough, that fixed it. No problems at all. It’s clear to me that re-verifying the game cache from within Steam is clearly not a fool-proof method, but either way, I’d love to know what exactly caused these issues to begin with.

Any of you guys have similar issues with Steam?