[dreen]

Steam is terrible. It requires the whole app to be running and fully up to date before you can launch a game. It has a slow load time. Even on a decent machine, if you haven't played a steam game in a while and you want to run one, you might be looking at a good few minutes before the game even starts to load. In the name of what, stopping piracy? AFAIK most pirated games come from steam anyway.

I realise this is still better than Mac App Store, but I wish they just let me run a the game without running Steam.

[gknoy]

All of the things you say are true, and I also agree on the "self-inflicted" delays a sibling poster mentions.

All of these mattered very little to me when I went to reinstall a game I hadn't played in two years, after a move and a computer crash. I have games on physical media that I can no longer install, or that I can't find the discs for. Fantastic games like Bioware RPGs, or Borderlands.

With Steam, I can open a fresh machine, install the Steam app, and then install (mac versions of) games I bought in pc-version, or for which I no longer can find the media.

Between Steam's library sharing, access to cross-platform versions of games, and the fact that I can install it from scratch anywhere I have an internet connection, I don't want to buy games any other way. There are many ways to improve, but that ease of recovery and reinstallation (not to mention that it saves my save-games in the cloud for some RPGs) has been well worth any performance hits.

The "whole app" is tiny, and I need to update it maybe once a month. It's not worth complaining about.

[prewett]

Steam.app is small when you download it, but it seems to download hundreds of megabytes of something after you run it.

[kogepathic]

What you download is just a stub, when then pulls down the rest of the components required to run Steam. It's the same thing with their Linux installer.

Honestly the frequency with which companies are only offering stub installers bothers me. My company has an office in a country with terrible internet, and since Microsoft no longer offers an offline installer for Office (unless you have a volume license key, which we're too small to have), it's absolute hell to have our employees download and install office on their computers when they join the company.

[simoncion]

> Honestly the frequency with which companies are only offering stub installers bothers me.

In general, I heartily agree with you. However, because Steam's primary purpose is to download and install huge gobs of data from Valve's servers, I feel that Valve's decision to ship just a stub installer is totally justified.

MSFT's stub Office installer, or Google's stub Chrome installer? Inexcusable.

Edit: Ugh. I should caffeinate. Steam's primary purpose is to let you play video games. However, the way it does that is by downloading gobs of data & etc.

[robotresearcher]

I'm a parent of young kids, and fire up steam maybe once a month. Guess what happens to my precious game time nearly every single time.

[simoncion]

So, you can do a couple of things:

* Start Steam when you log in to your computer, but have yourself signed out of Friends so you don't get friend activity notifications.

* If you're concerned about data usage, or don't want all of your games to update when you launch Steam, set your games to only update when you launch them. [0] Sadly, there's no way that I can see to make this the default update strategy, so you have to do this for every game in your library that has annoyingly frequent updates. :( Also note that you can configure Steam to not download updates when a game is running [1] and that Steam makes the update game you're trying to launch the highest-priority download.

* Run Steam in Offline mode (assuming you're not playing multiplayer games ;) ) : https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3160-AGC...

Sadly, I don't see any way to run some sort of "Steam client and game updating" service that runs in the background and just keeps the client and your games updated even while you're not logged in to either Steam or your Windows account.

[0] Right-click on the game->Properties->Updates, change the value of the "Automatic updates" dropdown menu to "Only update this game when I launch it".

[1] IIRC, this is the default setting.

[robotresearcher]

Thanks, friend. I appreciate the help, and I'm sure others will too. I reboot my MacBook Pro into Windows for gaming only, but I'll take advantage of your advice when I can.

[simoncion]

> I reboot my MacBook Pro into Windows for gaming only...

Implying that Steam only runs rarely.

Yeah, that complicates things. :( Best of luck!

[outworlder]

Yeah, exactly the same thing happens every time. There isn't much of a way around it though, it should really do automatic updates.

[Splines]

It does do automatic updates as long as it's running.

[huac]

it does...

if you don't want steam to be a distraction but still install updates, run it and put yourself in offline mode. the footprint is pretty small, except when it's actually installing.

[dreen]

Yes but all of that is achievable without a bloated hog that steam interface is. Just run a thin updater, with a task manager icon as only UI, and a separate app for the store and downloading/installing games. You can probably cram the rights management into the tiny app as well without making sacrificing too much.

[simoncion]

> Yes but all of that is achievable without a bloated hog that steam interface is.

Steam uses ~120 MB of RAM on my system. Google Chrome uses 300+ MB of RAM with just the Google home page loaded.

> ...with a task manager icon as only UI,

You can configure Steam to only display a system tray icon when you don't have the Steam window open.

[wtallis]

If you don't let Steam run in the background, then of course it's not going to be able to update games in the background. The delay in launching games is thus at least partly self-inflicted. And Steam certainly has justifications other than DRM for being strict about keeping games up to date: any networked game will probably need to match the version of the server, and in general it's good policy for Steam to trust developers have good reasons for pushing out updates.

There are also Steam games that don't use Steam's DRM and can be run without Steam. It's up to the individual game developers whether to include the DRM.

[simoncion]

> [Steam] has a slow load time.

Odd. On my six-year-old potato PC, Steam takes 10 seconds from the time I click on the Steam icon until the time the UI is up and I can interact with it.

> ...if you haven't played a steam game in a while and you want to run one, you might be looking at a good few minutes before the game even starts to load. In the name of what, stopping piracy?

Probably in the name of downloading and applying the most recent game patch. On the off-chance that you weren't talking about patch downloading, I started a game in my library that was installed, but that I hadn't played in over a year. It loaded just as quickly as any other game in my library.

If patching bothers you, run Steam in Offline Mode.

> ...I wish they just let me run a the game without running Steam.

If you want to go that route, you can probably find any number of methods to spoof the Steam DRM.

[justinclift]

You can launch your games in Offline mode, which stops the need for having to go online/update/contact-the-Steam-servers-before-launch.

It's not totally straight forward though. You need to unplug your network device (or turn off wifi, etc) so the initial startup times out, and gives you the option to use Offline mode.

There might be a command line switch way to do that too, but I've never looked. ;)

[mastax]

There's also a menu option for 'Go Offline...'

[justinclift]

Yeah, but you need to be connected online first for that. eg go through the whole "Steam starts, updates itself, etc". :)

[chipperyman573]

Once you launch a game once through steam you can just run the launcher file.

[dreen]

I'm pretty sure That still launches steam app and updates it before launching the game.

[squeaky-clean]

That's up to the game/publisher. With Bastion for example, you can copy the game directory to another PC and it will still work. But most games will require Steam to run first.

[teen]

this isn't true- you don't have to update games. it's up to each individual game to decide.