Yes, but by that definition, everybody but Valve is a small guy when it comes to digital distribution, including EA and Ubisoft :-P

Okay, so after a whole decade Valve for the first time says that the feature is actually meant to work the way everyone was expecting it to work ten years ago and funnily enough now Valve is talking about technical issues still keeping the feature from working the way everyone was expecting it to work ten years ago. You must admit that the absurdity of the whole scenario is hilarious no matter how you look at it.
And that's correct.

Yes but I haven't had that experience with Steam. Every time I use offline mode the last 4-5 years it works like a charm. That's what you seem to be ignoring or missing here. If it didn't work it would annoy me. However in my experience it does work. I can't pretend I had someone else's experience.

Valve saying it should work indefinitely and anything else is a bug they continue to work in is believable to me, because offline mode works fine in my experience.

What's "funnier" is that most games themselves don't require an online connection until Steam gets involved. "Your game looks good. You want to sell it on Steamworks then add Steam functionality." Leave that stuff out and < poof! > off-line mode isn't a problem - big or small - any more.

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And that's fine I guess. I mean, if the customer knows that going into the deal then it's their decision. If you live an always-connected lifestyle then it will rarely - if ever - be a problem, and more power to ya if you like what that service has to offer. For me, it's another reason to stay away.

I must say I have never had any problems with it either...

Yeah, I'm sadly among those people who initially (since the release of Half-Life 2 until late 2007) depended on offline mode as I only had a slow connection with the bill growing by the minute and I was shocked to see that every couple of days, two weeks at best, I had to log in once which usually resulted in a mandatory update which could take several hours and offline mode would not work before the update was finished. Things got a little better after several months, I would usually be able to play without logging in for several weeks but I would inevitably get some error message and would be required to log in - most likely resulting in yet another big update.

Another weird thing is that offline mode would usually only work fine if I manually entered offline mode while online. If I was online, then lost the connection for one reason or another, I would always be unable to enter offline mode unless I'd be able to log in online again.

I have rarely tried to use Steam while offline since I got broadband but I have also had mixed results since then.

Btw, oddly enough I remember that originally I was able to play Half-Life 2 before it was fully downloaded, Steam would continue to download the content from later portions of the game while I was still playing the earlier ones. Compare that to now where, as far as I can tell, you're completely unable to download anything while in-game (even the "resume update" trick that I've been using for years has stopped working ever since they introduced the download manager).

Don't know if this helps at all Trilarion

Steam has just gone down in the past 10 minutes or so, was playing Euro Truck Sim 2 and when I exited it shown the game still active (green border round my avatar bottom right side of client in library). so I exited out of Steam to restart it.

Clicked the Steam icon and error logging in block with option to try again or go offline, clicked on start in offline mode and it fired up offline and I can play all my games with no issues.

sry

You know what, I chip in trying to help people out, you are the second user in the past few days that has replied with a snide remark towards me.

The fact Steam went down and I managed to log into it in offline mode without any issues, just thought I would share that with Trilarion thinking it may or may not be of use with his testing the offline functionality.

Bollocks to it, why should I even bother with this damned immature community when you get nothing more that snide remarks and arseholes throwing crap at you regularly.

I am done with this forum

I will still buy games from GOG but that is it :(

See everyone around on Steam who I have as friends there, at least we are a bit more mature and can chat about games and screenshots etc

EDIT:

I do apologise for generalising the entire community, there are some great users here I enjoy the interactions with but unfortunately there are a few (minority) who go so far to the extreme picking apart comments etc. I just can't be done with it anymore :(

Just use the down rep button considering it ignores posts you don't want to see until some user filter script arrives.

It's people like you that force the rest of us to suffer through draconian DRM. Yes, it sucks that publishers and developers have this delusional idea that forcing DRM down legitimate users throats is the best way to fight piracy, but unfortunately a lot of them still think like this. And the more you pirate, the more DRM some of these companies are gonna use, and the more those of us who don't want to kill the PC platform will be forced to boycott games because you can't be bothered to uphold your principles in a way that actually results in positive change.

Oh Jesus Christ, please do yourself a favor and shut the fuck up, do you really think the time it was worth to type that paragraph was better spent than doing something productive?

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm wasting my time too, so please just deal with it.

I'll go to TPB and torrent some games now so you can cry yourself to sleep thinking about the poor billionaire publishers suffering from piracy.

tl;dr Deal With It

Iain many thanks for your post. Not all people here are like this. I really appreciated it and maybe it'll help. I didn't reply immediately because I didn't have time and the offline mode functionality of Steam is not of immediate interest for me currently.

In principle I often see the same behavior. Steam insists of telling me almost each time (in oppposition to past behavior) that offline mode is allegedly so bad and then it offers me the choice and then most of the time the offline choice works but not allways. It seems like a step backwards.

I wonder what happened to the people that they insult each other here. I really don't understand why. I just wanted to discuss how much offline capability and statistical certainty about the successful working of the offline mode there is for Steam. I don't want and I don't need people to have discussions about the evilness of Steam because there were a trillion threads already here and elsewhere. And the thread title says it very clearly what this should be about.

I like a discussion how useful a broken offline mode is. But apart from that some people love Steam and others not and we should leave it in this thread at that.

Ah, damn, sorry Iain. It's just a ten year problem that won't go poof overnight, and the suggestion has kind of ticked me off a bit. I really apologize for the tone, I could well have put that very differently and less offensive.

I really didn't want to sound THAT snide back there.

So far the offline mode works for the last week.

Btw there is no simple way to circumvent the very annoying "do you really want to go offline dialog" that comes on every start meaning one additional click every time.

However there is a solution (http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/102867/remove-steam-is-currently-set-to-be-in-offline-mode-dialog - second answer) that is not difficult either.