Steam Crashes During Sons of the Forest Release

By Tanner Dedmon

Steam users finally were able to purchase Sons of the Forest this week after the game's long-awaited release on Thursday, but the release appears to have crashed Steam for many. That's not the fault of Sons of the Forest, however – in fact, it's a sign of just how much people wanted the game. Upon release, Steam shoppers were hit with error codes that prevented them from accessing any part of the Steam store unless someone was lucky enough to get through. Given the timing of the atypical Thursday release of the game, one can only assume that it was Sons of the Forest that brought Steam down, an achievement the game and Endnight Games can now boast before anyone's really even had a chance to play it.

Sons of the Forest was scheduled to release in the middle of the day on Thursday with Steam's countdown slowly dwindling until the game was supposed to be live. Once that time came, however, people found that it still wasn't ready to download yet. The game quickly started trending on Twitter and other social media platforms down as people wondered where the game was and when they'd be able to play it.

The game did of course release eventually, and with that release, the gates were open for people to rush in and buy it. Everyone apparently had the same idea to do so since they'd been waiting on its launch anyway, and that influx of people took down Steam's store.

"Did the release of Sons of the Forest break Steam? I can't get in to get it now," one user pondered.

"Steam Store is chugging rn everyone wants sons of the forest," another noted.

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The error code in question that people keep getting when trying to access Steam's store is "E502 L3." A quick look online shows that that's one which frequently appears whenever there's a big sale going on via Steam or something of that nature, so basically it's an error that pops up whenever everyone's trying to get on Steam and download something at the same time. It's not something that's seen too often, but given that Sons of the Forest did release during the middle of a workday, perhaps Valve wasn't quite so prepared for how many people would be refreshing the Steam store to get the game as soon as it was available.

To add to that achievement, Sons of the Forest isn't even technically fully available yet. It's only available in early access with a full release to come later, though that obviously hasn't dissuaded people from picking it up.

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