Disable automatic downloads if it isn’t a multiplayer game, and if it is get a singleplayer plan b game (make sure to allow downloads in the background if on steam that way the other game updates while you play)
unless this changed in the last 2 years, steam detects if a game has an “update pending” so regardless if you go offline, if it detected there was an update it prevents the game from launching. I tried to get around my parents crap download with that trick and it failed.
edit: I just attempted this again on my laptop, they have slightly fixed the issue. If an update is queued when you’re online you can remove it from the queue and then go offline and you can play it again. However if you are online you still need to update in order to play the game. This is much better than what it used to be, which was if it detected that you need an update even if you canceled the update and went offline it would say update required.
old post: If you could point me to these settings that you indicate it would be much appreciated,
Please be aware that if the setting your indicating is the allow background updates or the prevent auto updates. While that will make it so the game will not update automatically it will still register the game as requiring update which means if you go offline it won’t let you play the game until the update has been done.
I’m going to go test it again because it’s been a while since I’ve tried update in a few minutes
A workaround you can do is, before launching steam disconnect from the internet, then launch steam, when it launches it will say no connection and give an option to launch in offline mode, once offline mode is launched you can turn your internet back on. Just keep in mind steam also has to refresh your games every once and awhile as well so you have to go online at /some/ point or it won’t let you play the game offline anymore. Steam is super annoying in that matter.
When you’re already losing interest in gaming, there’s nothing worse than having to sit through long updates because you haven’t turned on your machine for a while.
This was my first thought, too. I loathe that STUPID MUSIC by now. I can hear it as I type this. "Duuuuuun duuuuuuuun dooooooo....." Over and over and over and over.
Let’s consider a “decent” Internet speed of 200 mb/a. That’s 25 MB/s so it’d take 1,600 seconds to download 40,000 MB. That’s 26 minutes, so nearly half of your time is gone. Plus there is always time spent doing something like “installing”, checking the files, or whatever other stuff needs to be done besides just downloading the raw content.
Also, you don’t always get 100% of your advertised Internet speed 100% of the time.
Until just a year or two ago a 40gb update would take as much as 3 or 4 days to download and it would take up almost all of my data. Even most of America still has shitty internet.
Don’t pretend that any more than 1% of users would use anywhere near that much bandwidth. Even if you had five devices streaming 4K video all at once, you’d barely saturate a 200 Mb/s connection.
Large file transfers are the exception, not the norm. People don’t tend to regularly download or upload several gigabyte files on a daily basis. Maybe 2-3% of people who are either tech enthusiasts or graphics designers/artists/film makers do that but nobody else does, and even then 200-400 Mb/s will still be fine, nowhere near a hair-pullingly slow experience.
Your general point still stands, mind you, I was just curious about it and figured others might like the info too 😉
Quite shocked that Sweden doesn’t rank any higher though. They have or used to have the second most total fiberoptic bandwith in the world after the US which has roughly 30 times the population spread out on 22 times the area…
Romania, Denmark and Thailand are far from 100% city though 😄 I’m not sure about the ratios in the other two, but here in Denmark, there’s a LOT more farmland, forest and smaller towns by area than cities…
It doesn’t matter, I have a decent bandwidth and still end up losing interest while updating the OS and then the game I intend to play. I end up on TikTok or playing Switch.
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