To all people arguing here - really NOONE has an old, unneeded PC that is not connected to the internet to test if the offline mode for weeks or months?

Do you need to argue over and over again instead of just settling this once and for all?

edit: oh, there is one person! cool. You know, I have my old dad's PC with no internet connection and I just checked my steam offline mode that was used for 2 years now. But it's an old client version, so you know, test invalid.

Steam promoters obviously want to eat the cake and have it too in these arguments.

"Steam has a permanent offline mode, you know? If you lose your internet connection, just use the offline mode to play your installed Steam games. Problem solved."

"How do you dare to expect the offline mode to work? The TOS explicitly states that internet connection is required to use Steam! You were stupid to expect the offline mode to work without internet."

It would be an interesting test, but I wonder if different games have different offline requirements. Such as the newer releases need to check in once a week, while stuff like civ4 is once a month.
I have a lot of old spare computers laying around, but I am too lazy.

seeing this appears to be a STEAM bashing thread.

The daily (or very nearly) updates really piss me off

If Steam is really what you want to test, then the best games to test would be those that use only those policies imposed Valve and nothing in addition to that or no stricter mode or anything. The best candidates for that would seem to be obvious, namely their own games. If you want to test Steam DRM in an as vanilla way as possible you test Half-Life 2 or Portal or something.

I have played Portal completely offline (and missed having achievements :P), so anyway it works, but you have to set the offline mode manually before exiting steam and disconnecting from the Internet. Afterwards I could use it offline for about 2 weeks, and got online only to add some new games. Maybe there are recent changes which break this behaviour, i'll test after the steam sales are over...

So 2 weeks for you? What happened after that? Are you locked out of steam completely?

I've bought a humblebundle :D... and had to go online to add the keys. As I said, I can try this again, but after the sales are done :)
I've also once forgot to go offline before closing steam... and couldn't play anything from it that weekend because it was complaining of some local data missing.

Really?
"To make use of the Software, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet."
I see no mention of requirement of internet connection during the initial installation. Not to mention that my notebook is always running Steam in offline mode, but I go online every now and again to download a game so I can't really say how reliable it is for long-term use.

Of course there isn't. Steam also makes it abundantly clear that you rent the games purchased off it. The only problem I can see here is that you don't have Steam user agreement readily availible to you when you buy retail games with Steamworks, then again, that's not a fault of Steam, that's a fault of whoever publishes said game in retail.

I've hardly had money for food when I was jobhunting, yet I have set aside some for paying the internet connection - and if this connection were so expensive in a country I live in that I knew there's a chance I couldn't afford it, well, not buying games requiring internet connection would probably be my priority. Solidarity is one thing, but I'm not going to feel sorry for someone who's not able to make sensible decisions and research when purchasing stuff.
Do go ahead and show me where I said that. The best I ever say is 'Steam has an offline mode, but it can be unreliable'

Oh my, I'm a terrible person. I think you understand what I mean. I don't really know about customer protection rights, what I do know is that Valve could most likely cut access to the games I have on Steam at any time. That's what I adjust my buying decisions to, mostly by only buying when games get relatively cheap.

If you'd sue them, you'd most likely win in EU.

If they decided to pull the plug for no reason for many customers at once, the shitstorm would be heard on the moon :P

We had that famous quote in a movie once "We don't have your coat and what can you do about it?" in the cloakroom, but it's no longer 1970s, and they can't just piss on you without consequence.

This is one of the reasons why steam doesn't cut you from your games when you're banned, only disallows you to purchase new ones. Even EA changed their policy and doesn't delete your games anymore. Because they know they can't do that.

Don't let be tricked by corporations that they have more power than they actually do.

Well... To be fair, I just took Steam's end user agreement for what's written in it. I know that a large part of it could most likely be overriden by local law, however every time I buy a game on Steam I know what am I doing. See, I don't actually mind at all when people are saying that Steam is a crappy form of DRM, that they refuse to use it for what it is etc. - they know where their priorities are and are acting on them. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. What I don't like is when somebody is buying games from Steam and then complains about it, even tho the terms are publically availible for everyone to see even before installing the client itself.

So you only are allowed to buy games on steam if you love it? ;P I don't know, I respect people who don't allow their rights to be smashed into the floor by corpos.

Although it would be nice if all that complainers gathered into some class action lawsuit ;p

It's not like they can write whatever they want in their ToS and get away with it. It's not USA, ffs ;p Also, the ToS argument isn't that great either, because maybe you remember not that long ago Valve forced everybody to agree to their new ToS under a threat to remove the account.

I don't love Steam, I just don't mind it for the most part. What I am saying is that when you don't want Steam to impede on your freedom to enjoy your games, you don't buy games on Steam. I would understand their arguments if Steam was the only option to buy videogames, but there are loads of other options - and by only using those options you are voicing your opinion, not by throwing money at Valve and then complaining about it.