Good morning everyone! I’m sorry to report that today is probably not a great day for video games. At least, not if you want to play them on Steam, as a whole lot of us are finding it impossible to launch our Steam clients today.
Unfortunately, I’m among your unhappy number. When I logged in today, I found myself wanting to look a particular game up on Steam so I launched the program on my PC. It logged me in, then displayed the text “Loading user data…” and kept displaying it…and kept displaying it. For minutes. On end. It’s stuck there. I’ve tried closing Steam and relaunching it, no dice.
Apparently, I’m not alone. A number of others are in similar agony:
Steam isn’t down, to be clear. It’s not a Tuesday evening, after all. You can access Steam through your browser, which may be key to a fix for some of you. Many users are reporting that you can go to the licenses page in your browser and remove a game demo from your account to solve the issue. However, it doesn’t seem to be working for everyone, and I was unable to verify it myself because I’m seemingly one of those it does not work for. But you can give it a shot if you’re also stuck on the Loading user data screen and see.
This doesn’t seem to be a new problem. Users also posted about it a week ago…and even years ago. This issue seems to come and go, and all sorts of solutions have been proposed over the years. But as with the majority of Steam issues, by far the most reliable fix is just to go do something else until Valve fixes the client, which usually happens within a few hours to a day. In fact, by the time I finished prepping this article, Steam had righted itself and logged me in. But I think it’s only right to run this article anyway given how often this issue seems to creep up on people. A day from now, a week from now, a year from now, this may happen to us again. When that time comes, just delete a license or wait it out; it doesn’t matter as long as you follow your heart. Steam will always return eventually.