Steam has recently been enjoying new game releases featuring exclusive content for the platform. The likes of Death Stranding and Fall Guys come with Valve-inspired cosmetics (e.g. a Gordon Freeman from Half-Life costume), but it's possible that some Steam users found themselves unable to even play these games to begin with.
Recently, after the usual Tuesday afternoon maintenance, users noticed that some games they had purchased were listed as if they hadn't been bought, with the "play" button replaced with "purchase." That's already annoying, but if they attempted to buy the game in question again, it created an error saying that the game was already available in their library.
People began to share their experiences with the issue and, judging by peoples' comments, it appears that the primary victims were Bethesda titles like Fallout: New Vegas and Doom. The problem wasn't exclusive to Bethesda, though, with other users mentioning Life is Strange: Before the Storm, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Middle-earth: Shadow of War.
One user even stated that it had affected any games they owned that were currently on sale, which happened to apply to most of Bethesda's games and Dead by Daylight, with many users mentioning they were unable to play it.
While some hoped that the issue lay with the publishers and not Steam, the Dead by Daylight Twitter account posted that it was looking into the issue itself and later provided a suggestion for how to fix it, which was to go into Steam Settings and clear the download cache. Users later confirmed that this did work, very much proving that the bug was on Steam's end.
Thankfully, Steam has since notified players that it has resolved the issue, so users should no longer be experiencing the problem. If anyone still is though, the recommendation is to simply restart Steam so as to allow the fix to take effect.
This hasn't been the only thing to irritate Steam users recently. When Fall Guys launched, enthusiastic would-be players swarmed the game and its servers were unable to cope and many of them couldn't play it. Some, in their frustration, took to Steam to review-bomb Fall Guys, prompting the game's Twitter account to put out a statement that the team was working hard on getting the servers to run smoothly and that people should hold off from posting negative reviews.
Source: GameSpot