The difference is that Valve have let everyone know and told them to change their passwords as soon as possible and to watch their credit card statements. They have also confirmed exactly what information was exposed and how it was protected (hashed passwords and credit card info encrypted with the best encryption in the business) and not shut down their entire service for weeks.

By being transparent and up front about the situation they have mitigated the wild speculation that surrounded the PSN hack. The fact that this has happened before also help lessen the impact.

pezus probably blocked out anything negative against Sony. What you don't know can't hurt you, right?

Well it's been cool to hate sony since 2005 in the press every journo wants to see a big guy fall from grace, Steam and Valve don't tend to end up in the news much for anything bad at least!

Had this been 2003 when Steam first launched the press and general forum dwellers would have been all over it with Valve slandered to the hills

As for the two situation neither was handled badly at all, we all just think we know better thats all, Sony pulled there service because they couldn't guarantee it's safety (imagine the shit they would have got had it stayed up and people lost money left,right and centre!) Steam have pulled there forums for the same reason but have no reason to suspect the service is compromised.

Sony and Valve are the victims in all this and we paint them as the biggest bastards going something very twisted in the way people perceive things online kinda scary really!

I agree that the companies are also victims....but consumer anger is well justified. These companies ask consumers to entrust personal and confidential information to them, under the pretense that they are able to secure that information. Or at the very least adhere to the bare minimum standards in security mechanisms. In Sony's case they didnt even do that.

If companies are gonna require information from consumers, they need to be able to secure it. And if they dont, then consumers should be angry. After all, in such cases consumer trust is so important....which is why sony themselves made a pretty big deal about it as well as the big public apology that came afterwards. Im pretty sure they new that they messed up and deserved the backlash from consumers.

They took 4 days the same amount of time as Sony and it's pretty easy to see what to do when you have a reference point , I haven't seen any Steam must have crap security not to pick the intrusion up earlier statements like there was with Sony also Sony's passwords where hashed and the cards encrypted as well .

Not true, at all.  initially they thought it was restricted to the forums and also thought it was a minor hack, so they did no mandatory changing of paswords, like Sony did when PSN was finally up.  I'm sure most felt safe enough to keep passwords the same since Valve didn't come off as too worried.

@ OP

The major difference here is the "console warz."  Had Steam been a console, and was competing against the 360 and the PS3, it would have blown up even more.  You would have had fanboys of both consoles ripping into them.  Plus, you would have the PC fanboys (many of whom are defending Valve now because it is PC gaming) adding to it.  Of course, it didn't help that even gaming journalists can be fanboys, like the one who wrote this article.  "In other words, it pretty much made the PlayStation more of a pile of scrap than it already was."  Come on, really?  Seems like something that would have been "okay" in 2006/2007, but not now.  Besides, I'm sure 55 million people would disagree with you.

Personally, I think Sony did the better thing.  Yes, they waited longer than Valve to tell users what was going on, but they also took down the service until they knew EXACTLY how big this was and found ways to make the service more secure.  Valve, on the other hand, told people sooner, but went ahead without knowing the full extent of what happened, so didn't force password changes or change the security, at all.  Now that they have investigated further, they see it was worse than they thought previously, and by not forcing certain security measures, may have made the situation worse.  Something tells me they may not know the full extent of this even now.  And as of now, I think the service is still up.

and if i'm not mistaken they took 4 days to announce the breach as well...

Like PSN, will this result in free games???? :P

Actually sony took a week to tell people that their information was compromised, and had taken the service down for 3 days (a day after the attack) before they notified people why it was taken down and then just said possibly a hack with no real details, and 5 days after the attack admited the possibility of personal info being taken, and a full 7 days until after the attack they let people know data had been taken.  http://www.pcworld.com/article/226393/playstation_network_hack_timeline.html

As for forcing password changes that was happened when the forums were brought back online, steam accounts themselves weren't compromised.

when was it confirmed that credit card info had been stolen? as far as i know it was only ever confirmed that it may have been stolen