We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

Steam support get 75,000 requests a day, says new stats page

steam_logo_1_0_0

Valve have announced improvements to Steam’s support services and, in the name of transparency, have launched a new stats page. There you can view such data as the number of submitted help requests against the backlog awaiting a response, the types of help request submitted, and so on.

Remember, they’re there to help you play the best games on PC without disruption.

Valve software engineer John McCaskey discusses the many changes made to Steam Support, which has been a big focus for Valve of late.

“We overhauled our support site, we’ve built better integrated tools, we no longer require a separate account to contact support, and we’ve increased our support staffing. We’ve also fixed as many bugs as possible and have provided new self-service options where they make sense,” says McCaskey.

The latest improvement is towards transparency, via a new stats page that will show users the number and variety of help requests submitted, alongside Valve’s response times. “We believe that increasing transparency will both help users understand how we are doing and will help make sure we keep improving over time.”

The stats page is live and available for you to view here.

Sweet, sweet data

As McCaskey says, it shows a graph of submitted help requests (in blue) alongside a graph of the backlog of requests awaiting a response (in red). He points out that the red line has gone down since February, from over 50,000 requests in the backlog to around 8,000. “We’ve worked hard to expand our staffing and to improve our support services to get to this point,” he says.

Some requests are also broken down by category, alongside their typical wait time. Again, McCaskey highlights that most of those 75,000 daily requests are resolved within a few hours, particularly those that pertain to Steam’s refund policy – the largest category of request.

The second-largest category are account security and recovery requests, which range from “users who have simply forgotten their password all the way through users who have been phished or hijacked”. These are more complicated to resolve, but McCaskey is still pleased to say wait times are down to under 24 hours for 98% of requests.

So Steam support is improving, basically. You can let Valve know how they’re doing at the discussions page here.

Here’s the announcement, if you’d like to read it in full.