5 ms·

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,

by dreen 11y ago

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.

chipperyman573 11y ago
Once you launch a game once through steam you can just run the launcher file.
- dreen 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure That still launches steam app and updates it before launching the game.
  - squeaky-clean 11y ago
    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.
wtallis 11y ago
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.
gknoy 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Steam.app is small when you download it, but it seems to download hundreds of megabytes of something after you run it.
  - kogepathic 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      > 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.
justinclift 11y ago
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 11y ago
  There's also a menu option for 'Go Offline...'
  - justinclift 11y ago
    Yeah, but you need to be connected online first for that. eg go through the whole "Steam starts, updates itself, etc". :)
teen 11y ago
this isn't true- you don't have to update games. it's up to each individual game to decide.
simoncion 11y ago
> [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.

by dreen 11y ago

chipperyman573 11y ago

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

dreen 11y ago
I'm pretty sure That still launches steam app and updates it before launching the game.
- squeaky-clean 11y ago
  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.

wtallis 11y ago

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.

gknoy 11y ago

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 11y ago
Steam.app is small when you download it, but it seems to download hundreds of megabytes of something after you run it.
- kogepathic 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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.

justinclift 11y ago

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 11y ago
There's also a menu option for 'Go Offline...'
- justinclift 11y ago
  Yeah, but you need to be connected online first for that. eg go through the whole "Steam starts, updates itself, etc". :)

teen 11y ago

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

simoncion 11y ago

> [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.