Any way to play without steam?

[Corazon]

No I do apreciate your help and input. But I've prity much solved it now through 10 hours of waiting. That was a post getting pissed off by british telecom rant post lol

Just curious, why is your Internet connection so slow anyway? Isn't that what you should be trying to fix? :shock:

You've always struck me as quite a geek and I'm surprised you'd even tolerate a dial-up service. If that's so, I can't imagine that updating your game through Steam is the only time you find yourself frustrated with the connection...

 

[badger906]

Its an external fault but BT being run by people who still consider sand a viable and accurate means of time telling is the problem.. trust me I've tried! Hour after hour spent ringign call centers explaining my issue, and talking to someone who has no computer experience..

Normally I survive with my 1.7Mbps and don't complain. BT are coming out to fix an issue near my house next week.

But its a recurring fault, personally I think its extreme throtteling, as a previous call center worker informed me my "speed profile" was at the lowest setting, a flick of a switch and it was fine, but no other telephone answerer called david beckham has mentioned it and or ignores me when I do.
And aww I try to be a geek

 

[Arm4L1t3]

Guys, for a lot of the games that are purchasable from steam, even if you buy the physical copy you have to go online to activate it and install.

 

[Richardc269]

Going to the store and taking only 45 minutes tops, rather than downloading a 5 gig game that would take 2 whole days on my crappy ass DSL (125kb/s), I'd rather go with the store bought copy, and NOT spend the 2 whole days downloading it.

Second, I prefer the CD because if I lose the digital copy somehow...I'm not spending another 2 whole days to download it. So I'll stick with the cd-copy. And as Ozzy said in his earlier posts, I can crack/image my games if I own the CD bought from the store. I just don't do Steam. Period.

 

[Arm4L1t3]

Well, if you had the option of using steam or not, for the same games, I probably wouldn't be downloading it either. But you can't play a lot of the games without steam (ex: all the Valve games).

 

[Gromit1710]

It was rather nice being able to retrieve all my games when I switched to my new gaming PC.

Sure, I had to jump through some hoops to let Steam know that I was who I said I was, and I'm on the right computer. But I was able to get every single game (over 50 games) right back to where they belong in my library within 24 hours. Granted.. I researched on how to copy over all my saved games.. Steam doesn't tell you about that little trick

I'll be the first to advocate having a hard copy CD of something you legally own. I won't do pre-installed OS packages from computer makers for this reason and typically request hard copy's for any digital downloads of other applications that I buy.

Steam is the first place that I've trusted with not actually possessing cd's of the 100's of dollars I've spent on software. My biggest fear was always "What happens if my computer blows up and I need to get all my games back?" It honestly was a pretty painless process and saved me from even longer hours of feeding CD's into my machine.

I'll admit that the quick little automatic update they did for "Skyrim" that in-inadvertently disabled the game if the Large Address Aware mod was running was kinda shady. Using the LAA improved the game's performance and solved a huge P.I.T.A bug that caused the game to suddenly crash to the desktop without warning. The modding community had a work around within a matter of hours, but it did highlight an interesting topic. How much intrusion and control should a service like steam have over your PC?

Steam does have the option of running offline. If you really are that worried about steam nosing around and changing things, you can select this option and prevent your client from connecting to the steam server. You wont get any patches or updates and you won't be able to get any new games until you connect again. Alternately, You can stay online but select each game's properties to enable automatic updates or not. Turning this off will prevent updates being pushed directly onto the game and place it in a queue for you to select when you want to install.