Steam Support stats page shows how long you'll have to wait for a response on any given day

Steam is opening up about its frequently criticised support measures.

Steam Support has a very bad reputation, and it's something Valve has acknowledged as justified by regularly vowing to improve.

As part of this process, the developer is aiming for more transparency when it comes to Steam Support, opening up a new Steam Support statistics page where you can view up to date figures.

Announcing this service in a Steam Community post, Valve said it received around 75,000 support request each day, and has around 8,000 requests sitting around waiting to be answered at any given time. As a result of this huge volume of Steam Support requests, Valve has a backlog of requests which has been as high as 58,000 over the past three months, but is currently under 10,000.

This enormous number of tickets explains why Steam Support isn't instantaneous, but further down the page you can see current average wait times for various forms of Steam Support request (although Valve says these times only apply to 90% of cases; there will be egregious outliers). As you'll see, refund requests are processed in 2 hours or less, while account security and recovery troubleshooting is usually completed in less than half a day.

The least frequent type of Steam Support request is for purchase and billing help, and these difficulties take the longest to sort out at up to 1.8 days. That doesn't seem like a terrible turn around at this volume, but if there's been a billing error and you're unable to pay rent it's way, way too long.

Valve said it will continue to invest in staff and training to improve Steam Support, and welcomes feedback on its progress. So that's a thing.