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I have a bunch of games ready to be played but my internet connection is too slow to download steam.

I tried getting a updated installation file, which i did, but it still requires internet to complete the installation. Any help??

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  • possible duplicate of Download Steam games outside of Steam
    – acalypso
    Mar 26, 2014 at 10:16
  • Don't close as a duplicate of a newer question, which is closed as off-topic, when this question is on-topic.
    – 3ventic
    Mar 26, 2014 at 11:39
  • I'm not sure why we're attempting to dupe to a closed question. That's...silly.
    – Frank
    Mar 26, 2014 at 13:53
  • @Frank That would still be a perfectly legitimate close-reason, if this were actually a duplicate. Apr 11, 2014 at 23:22
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    @blue Closing as a dupe of an off-topic question should never be done. It should be closed as off-topic itself. Duplicates aren't auto-pruned, so we have extra work if we dupe to an off-topic question.
    – Frank
    Apr 12, 2014 at 0:13

2 Answers 2

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Games that require Steam cannot be legally played without Steam. Steam is essentially a form of digital rights management in the context of these games.

Steam is approximately 100MB to download, if you have a slow internet connection you're probably best off leaving it overnight to download as a workaround. If you really can't do this then there aren't many options left.

Once Steam and your game are both installed, you can put Steam into "offline" mode, which will allow you to play your games without being connected to the internet.

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  • Overnight (About 7 hours) for 100MB? Don't really think anyone has THAT terrible of a connection :P
    – MerajA
    Feb 15, 2014 at 15:06
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    100 MB? Didn't Steam use to be, like, 1.5 MB back in the days? Didn't think it's become that much of a bloatware...
    – Nolonar
    Feb 15, 2014 at 18:54
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    @Nolonar I think that's just the size of the web installer (which is pretty huge as far as web installers go).
    – kotekzot
    Mar 26, 2014 at 7:27
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    The initial DL is 1.5 MB, but that installer downloads the program itself, which is larger.
    – 3ventic
    Mar 26, 2014 at 11:43
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    @Nolonar It was never that small. But today, Steam is 90% a web browser - and the Chromium engine it uses is around 60 MiB, plus all the integration libraries for games (in 32-bit and 64-bit, for a total of about 20 MiB), plus integrated video coding and decoding (~10 MiB), UI overlay (10 MiB), and that's not even getting started on features like Panorama. Just the background images (the very weak "gradient" effect) are over 10 MiB (though probably smaller in the package). Steam simply does a lot of things, and Valve focus most of their efforts on improving (or bloating, as you'd say) it.
    – Luaan
    May 23, 2016 at 10:02
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Sometimes you can go into the steam directory, which is generally at C:\program files\steam\steamapps\commons, find your game and copy the files somewhere else.

Then inside the folder find the start file and run your game without steam!

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    This does not work for all games, and still requires installing Steam at one point.
    – user98085
    Mar 26, 2014 at 2:32
  • This only works for games added to steam as an afterthought, not optimised for it.
    – Robotnik
    Mar 26, 2014 at 7:05
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    @Robotnik That is not true. Arcengames for example always publishes on Steam and all their games do not use Steam DRM. They do utilize steam to it's fullest though, including Achievements but it is still possible to play without Steam. What they do is to load steam_api.dll dynamically(msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms684175), so if the dll is not there, it will just ommit all steam functions. May 4, 2014 at 13:37

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