How much data does steam use to reconnect and re-enable access to games?

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HomeSkillenSlice

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So I can go back to offline mode ...

If you were to reconnect to steam and go back offline to enjoy your offline games? If its in the MegaBytes range its not really a problem but if its like 50MB per verification I am seriously questioning using Steam to purchase single player titles. Especially for all these upcoming games like Metal Gear Solid V or Arkham Knight.

I'm also a new member as well, been on Steam for around 3-4 months maybe longer and I already have loads of games!

However as each day goes by I often question why people even bother to purchase full retail games from Steam at all. Sure its more convenient and its one less trip, but that one extra trip to the retail store will give you a full LEGAL copy of the game to backup to your hard drive for use throughout the years.


Anyone know how much data you need?


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Please stop reading now if you do not want to read a huge rant xD

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I've also been looking at finding other non DRM based services that sell AAA games but alas none exist.

I'm going on a long trip soon and I'm taking my portable gaming PC with me to a country where the only internet I'll be getting is if I pay like $100 for some cruddy 500 MB USB modem. I wanna game there but Steams offline gaming policies are not helping me.

I've been looking at maybe downloading all my games through Steam, and then creating an image of the system and backup all of my gamesaves on an external so that whenever 2 weeks went by and I had to reconnect I would just re-image my entire system to give me another 2 weeks of game time and backup all of my saves before I did all that, but that would probably torture a conventional consumer hard drive.

In the end I'm not bashing or hating Steams service at all, because Steam is probably one of the best things to happen to PC gaming. However this offline lock BS just has to stop. If people really wanted to give their (mostly) offline friends permanent access to their games they would not give them their entire library they would give them a much more convenient individual SETUP of the game for them to use and reinstall multiple times as they please.

I will always buy games like Arma 3, GTA V or COD on Steam because they are all great games that have a huge multiplayer component in them. Having permanent albeit DRM based access to your MULTIPLAYER games makes perfect sense. But single player games. Yea ... No .....

I have questioned DRM. Let the war begin XDDDD










 
Solution
Mouldread
Hey,

if I am not wrong you don't really need to connect to Steam to play your single player games. I'm not at home at the moment to confirm with 100% certainty but you can run Steam in Offline mode and then play your games. The only downside would be that you won't be able to get game updates (not like this happens that often) and maybe won't be able to get achievements (if you care for this type of stuff).
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Mouldread

Mouldread

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Hey,

if I am not wrong you don't really need to connect to Steam to play your single player games. I'm not at home at the moment to confirm with 100% certainty but you can run Steam in Offline mode and then play your games. The only downside would be that you won't be able to get game updates (not like this happens that often) and maybe won't be able to get achievements (if you care for this type of stuff).
 
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caqde

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Connecting to steam would use maybe 500KB. Depending on how much data is on the front store page. Verification of your games is nothing. Unless your game has an update there shouldn't be any major downloading going on. Connecting to my steam account moved my network meter from 258.6MB to 259.1MB meaning I downloaded a whopping 500KB to connect to steam and view the stores front page. If you set your favorite window to the library it would probably use less than that. Also if you have games that update often change their update settings so you can verify and offline without needing to download updates.
 
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HomeSkillenSlice

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Hey thanks for replying!

I've actually been reading a lot of forum posts since yesterday and apparently offline mode not functioning is not only a result of a bug, but also a result of how steam in general is programmed. Its still an issue and here is an article if u want to know more about it.

Internet for me is really just not a problem. But going out to different countries and not being able to play my games (games that i have a lot of $ invested in) DEFINITELY is. Well it is for everyone, including Steam lol.

They seriously need to do more about this issue.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/11/05/valve-fixing-steam-offline-to-run-indefinitely/
 
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HomeSkillenSlice

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That is great to hear! I really just wished there was an easier solution that didn't involve forcing people to invest in internet to simply MAINTAIN their collection of games, let alone enjoy them.

Hell I'm even contemplating torrenting the single player things. If I can have unlimited access to a game for the rest of my life while being connected to the internet, why can't I have access while not having any ---____________---

Anyways now I'm debating the overall legitimacy and morality of steam and essentially fighting a huge corporations policy that is designed with profit in mind, theres no point in debating that xD

On another semi related note is it possible to transfer your games over to a new computer with different hardware. I have been looking at Steam Backup and have also been reading forum posts about the simple process of just copying the steam folder and placing the folder in the new computer but is it really that simple? Because if so how redundant is that xDD. Yea sure go right ahead copy GB's worth of game files right over and give yourself as well as anyone else the ability to play your huge library of games until we ask you to login again .. lmao .. how redundant xD

I mean I dont know if its just me but if I wanted to I'd rather share a setup of a single player game with a friend and not have to worry about him instead of giving them temporary access to a couple of games through my account. Like .. xD

Are there any solid Steam articles or other articles that support that rough 500KB estimate?

 
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Damn_Rookie

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Just to note, that thread you linked to was talking about a problem that had long been fixed. A number of sites inadvertently discussed a bug that had long been fixed by Valve (the post it was all based on was 6 months old at the time of the RPS article being published).

Someone further down in the comments of that article helpfully copy and pasted a post from Valve on the original thread, that explained the "two week" check-in/timeout was removed ages ago:

"EDITED Nov 4 2013 – holy thread necro. Looks like Kotaku decided to link to this post from six months ago, and every game blog has copy-pasted it. The “two week” timeout issue has been fixed for months now, along with several other bugs. We’re still working on improvements, and you might catch them if you read the patch notes carefully, but we don’t bother to post on the forums every time we fix something (maybe out of fear that it will get posted as front-page news six months later?)"

So I don't think you'll need to worry about checking in every two weeks.
 
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HomeSkillenSlice

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Hey damn_rookie I can't directly reply to you because I'm on TH's sh**ty mobile version so you probably won't see a notification until I go back downstairs and quote you in it in the morning lol (assuming TH doesn't notify people when general posts are made, idk if that's the case xD)


That's also awesome to hear! If I can stay offline for a long time that would be fantastic news :D :D :D

But I noticed that you only said I won't have to worry about logging on for 2 weeks. Is the wait time now 3 weeks, a month? BTW thanks for notifying me about the comment below the article gonna go read it and see what's the deal.

DRM just has me going nuts lol.

 
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caqde

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Well lets see here. If you want to support a service that allows you to download your games and play them without worrying about being connected to a client. Check to see if your games are on GOG.com before purchasing from steam. Their entire policy is no DRM. They are in the process of making a non mandatory client but when you download a game from them and install it you are done enjoy have a nice day :). They do have some AAA games and an assortment of others but their pull will increase if players show developers that they purchase from their with their money.

As far as the steam backup moving steam files go. Yeah you can simply move the folder from one drive to the next if you want. I'm not sure how moving it to new hardware works I'm not sure if that would matter but I have transferred mine from one Windows install to the next. Although all I was moving was the SteamApps folder which contains your games. I don't leave my client logged in though so moving the application itself wasn't worth it to me.

On the last I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure the actual number is much smaller then that for logging in. Given that was from the network meter on my computer that I watched before and after I logged in. And mind you that transfer of data includes the loading of the store page. The loading of the store is usually cached though so depending on what has changed the amount of data transferred will change drastically from time to time. My account has ~190 games attached to it but I doubt that steam sends a large amount of data for authentication I'd be surprised if the actual authentication process caused more than 2KB of data to be sent back and forth.
 
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Damn_Rookie

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Sadly, I don't know for certain, but I believe their aim with the service was to get it so you could keep it in offline mode indefinitely. Whether or not they've got it into that state is questionable.

One thing to keep in mind about offline mode is that a lot of the comments people make about it on various websites and the like are based off of very old information; as you can imagine offline mode is used quite sparingly by the majority of gamers (often in an emergency when the internet is down), so a lot of the people who comment won't have used it in the last year or so, and are going off of a bad experience or two they had with the service in the past. This can naturally lead to offline mode sounding worse that it is. To note, some people do still have issues with it, as it's certainly not bug free or anything, but just keep in mind that some of the comments you see written are based on very old experiences with it.

Personally, I've used it a number of times, most recently a couple of months ago, where I had no internet followed by patchy internet for about a week. I had to switch between online and offline a lot during this, eventually just opting to leave it in offline mode for multiple days (I can't actually remember when I bothered to switch it back to online mode!). Thankfully, I had no issue with offline mode, and happily continued playing the game I was in the middle of at the time.
 
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HomeSkillenSlice

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I do have GOG and in fact I almost always go to see if any of my games are on there. Despite my interest in it though it's still a client that few developers are willing to give a shot due to the risk involved. But at the same time it's funny. Aside from giving gamers a way to interact and game with one another as well as their innovation (ex. Steam in home streaming), everything else is completely unnecessary.

Even right now as we speak there is a sale going on for the witcher 2 and I've been planning on buying the previous iterations to get prepared for the witcher 3 (so i can buy it on GOG) But because I hesitated with the sale and didn't buy it when it was on sale on GOG now I'm seeing the game available on sale for $5 on steam -_- The point is that im definitely keeping an eye on GOG and there are definitely some games I plan on buying from there in the future.

Looks like I'll have to do more research for the different hardware steam backup lol. I think it should be possible. There was a video that Linustechtips did not to long ago going over a detailed way to install your games on an external hard drive. If giving access to your games on random computers is allowed then transferring over your data simplistically to your new computer should also in theory be allowed.

I'd be more inclined to believe that it uses that original 500KB estimate. Nothing you do on the internet uses 2KB xD, except for maybe checking the date and time which is quite literally just checking a couple of numbers. In the end Steams purpose is to check if the users steam files are unaltered, not check the time through Steam or just let Valve know we're online haha.

Hopefully your estimate is right lol.

 
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HomeSkillenSlice

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This glitch really does boggle my mind. While I cant say I'm happy about having to deal with logging in when Im gone its at least somewhat of a relief to know that its not gonna happen on a strict schedule, hopefully it at least gives me a month or so before I need to login again.

The conspirator in me says its all a way to maintain a temporary offline mode but they probably wouldn't have said they'd fix it to work permanently if that was the case. Unless they plan on fixing it throughout the next 10 years xD

I've also learned that the 2 week limit was just a rumor that spread like wildfire because of how often people got disconnected when they needed steam the most. Very interesting.

I was searching for something along the lines of a steam offline crack or something today and nothing popped up, probably because it is indeed a glitch otherwise people would have somewhat taken advantage of that and allowed some sort of offline crack to make it work. Or maybe its just my limited knowledge on the matter of DRM that prevents me from understanding why that may not be possible with a game client (or I guess specifically with steam).

I have not really found a definitive answer to my question but nevertheless thank you all for your input and tahnks fuh helpin dis steam noob, PRAISE LORD GABEN :\ :D xD








 
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Damn_Rookie

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One other thing to add, that I just remembered (better late than never!), is that not all games that are on Steam, actually need Steam to be running. There are many games that, after installing, will operate just fine by starting the game's executable, without Steam itself running (you can even copy the game folder somewhere else and run the .exe there).

I don't believe this is a complete list, but here is a site that lists games that operate in this way, and gives a little background on the topic: http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games. I hope it's of some help.
 
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gamerk316

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Shouldn't be more then a couple of KB. The way Steam is implemented is that games won't launch without the Steam browser, making that the primary DRM for the platform. Hence why Offline mode exists, since you can launch the browser without an internet connection, and thus, the games still work. So the total cost would be the connection to the Steam servers, which is maybe a few MB, due more to the front page graphical content then anything else.
 
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HomeSkillenSlice

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Thanks for the list ! Now these devs I like :D
 
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HomeSkillenSlice

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Ahh that makes sense, I'd imagine that sending verification data to Steam wouldn't use much at all. Its always that store content, I'm wondering if there is a way to disable it?
 
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chenw

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Setting your favourite page (the page that displays on Steam Launch) to Library should solve that, the client only downloads data for store page when you are actually on the store page, not when you are somewhere else. (I think)
 
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