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Oh thank goodness.

The latest Steam beta update includes the following note:

“Fixed bug where in-game overlay could take two screenshots for a single hotkey press in some games that process input via DirectInput and Win32 input messages.”


This is a bigger deal than it sounds like.



Some bugs get squashed, others don’t. And sometimes, bugs stick around for so long that they just sort of fade into the background, become ghosts in the machine that you learn to live with, pollution that you breathe without even noticing. Such was the case with Steam’s double screenshot bug, which often made the universal screenshot hotkey snap two shots instead of one. This could also lead to lag, so people would press the screenshot button again, only to come away with way too many shots of the same damn thing.


Was it a small issue? Sure. But it was annoying as hell and plagued Steam users for years, taking up extra hard drive space and forcing people to manually delete doubles repeatedly. I honestly can’t remember a time without it, but mentions of it seem to have first started popping up in 2011.

Here we are all these years later, and the problem is finally goooooooooone. Birds are chirping, the sun is shining, the ozone layer is plotting its revenge, and the world is an ever so slightly better place.

But enough hyperbole. This really is important news given that it shows how easy it is to let little, well-known flaws linger for far too long. People can adjust to a lot of stuff, and sometimes developers use that as an excuse to let things stay busted—or leave the frayed wires dangling for all to see. Kudos to Valve for finally taking care of this, but—as ever—they could stand to be a lot more timely with this stuff.

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To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.