Steam customer support not "where it needs to be", says Valve

Steam has a pretty poor reputation for customer support, and Valve wants to do something about it.

The Steam community is full of horror stories of poor experiences with customer support - the difficulty of obtaining refunds, long periods of no communication, and more.

Valve's Erik Johnson told Kotaku that the company is well aware of this reputation, tuning in to users on sites like Reddit and Twitter, and wants to do something about it.

"We don't feel like our customer service support is where it needs to be right now. We think customers are right," he said.

"When they say our support's bad, our initial reaction isn't to say, 'No, it's actually good. Look at all of this.' It's to say that, no, they're probably right, because they usually are when it comes to this kind of thing.

"We hear those complaints, and that's gonna be a big focus for us throughout the year. We have a lot of work to do there. We have to do better."

Johnson said Valve needs to do a lot of work to bring its support systems up to scratch - it's not just a matter of putting more staff onto answering support requests.