Steam?

It's certainly more intrusive than SDC, but it's not as bad as people say.

The main thing is that you have to have STEAM running if you want to play STEAM games. You can play in an "Offline Mode" but it's pretty uncooperative and you need to still run STEAM anyway. It does have a built in IM/Friends system that lets you chat with friends ingame or out of game and join whatever server your friend is playing on automatically.

It's really not that bad and is often very convenient (in terms of easy organization, easy uninstalls and etc) but it's not for the extremely paranoid "YOUZ NOT BE MESSIN WIT MA SYSTEM!" types.

I've been using Steam since it came out. It's not a malicious program in any way, but there is one thing that annoys me about it. If you have older Valve games from before Steam(Half Life) it will take those games and transfer the files and such to where it essentially can only be played through steam just like the newer ones. There may be a way around this and still have both Steam and the games exist seperately, but it is kinda low priority so I haven't looked into it.

So you bought a legal copy of half life and steam hyjacked it?? That is really bad!

I have steam for x3 and i do regret it. The main problem is that steam automatically updates your game regardless of if you wanted the update or not. This really pissed me off with x3 because i did not like some of the changes made in recent updates, but steam forced it down my throat regardless.

I reccomend against getting steam.

This is the case even if you're running the game in "offline mode?" I wouldn't think it would know. You can't manually patch down?

If your in offline mode it will not update, however that will not work to stop an update which has already been started. As soon as Steam manages to connect to the internet, your screwed!

You do not have sufficient access rights to steam games to manually patch down.

Hmm, ok. Thanks Mystik, it sounds like you've pinned down the only substantive problem, now I just need to decide whether I can live with the inconvenience.

Steam games are like a rental dvd player with all options except the play button removed, you can posses it and you can play it but you cannot modify it.

steam forces the updates down your throat in order to help with their online anti-cheating software (VAC) -- at least for online games -- me, I only play Counterstrike and other half-life games on it, and its never bugged me about anything other than slowing my PC down on startup when it loads, but what auto-loading program doesn't?

It only does this with older Valve games, not other games I might own that are also available via Steam? Say, Civ 4 or X3?

I've been told by numerous other Steam users that auto-load can be turned off.

Yes and no,, Yes i have seen the option, however on my older pc where i no longer use steam... and i had the auto load turned off,, after some time it started auto loading again and this time there is no visable option to turn it off?

I believe it to only be Valve games, it might even only be Half life and it expansions that it does it to since that's the only Valve games I have. I have Civ 4 and have not had Steam react to it at all like it will if it finds an install of one of it's own.



My autoload has been turned off since Steam's inception and I've never had it pop back on. Just if you reinstall it you have to turn it off again.

Thanks to everyone for their input. I at least feel like I can make an informed decision now.