[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.