I've posted this a couple of times already but here's another recap of my experience with the client since I started this thread:

First of all, there is a marked difference between "offline mode" and "offline mode including the PC being actually offline". If you put the Steam client into "offline mode" but your PC is online and you don't setup your firewall to block the connection, the client will always connect to Valve regardless of the setting and thus "offline mode" will work indefinitely. It just isn't offline at all.

If you do block the connection or your PC simply isn't connected to the internet there are 2 options:
1. It works indefinitely.
2. It works for 14 days. Then it requires your login and has to be put online.

The interesting thing is that with every update my client randomly switches between these options and on any given version of the client, different people experience either option 1 or 2. This might be a bug of course, but my best guess is that Valve pushes slightly different setups of the client to their customers. That way they can analyze
whether changes to the client result in beneficial changes in usage. The same way, say, Amazon creates an A and a B version of parts of their site, routes 50% of customers to one and 50% to the other and then analyzes which group bought more, which group spend more time on the site and so on.
Valve seems a pretty data driven company and one of the core benefits of their client to developers and publishers is the data they collect for them. It seems reasonable to expect them to use their client in the same way to collect
usage data for themselves and the effect of allowing the client to be truly offline for extended periods sounds like a interesting variable to test.

That said, no matter if "offline mode" is bugged or works as designed, I would not recommend to use Steam if you really can't connect to the internet for extended periods of time. If you only want to use it for a couple of days here and there or if you don't mind if it doesn't work sometimes you'll be fine.

Considering that I e.g. bought my gaming PC 99% for gaming, yes. Not to mention that nowadays Steam has also expanded beyond mere gaming. And not to mention that most of my non-gaming PC use is about working online (like replying to this message of yours, or reading my work emails, or connecting to the testing labs with NX Client), while gaming is probably the main thing I'd do offline on PCs anyway.

It is actually somewhat similar with my Android tablet. If I don't have internet connectivity with it (which is the case quite often), it is pretty much purely a gaming device at that point, playing the Android-games bought from Humble Bundles, offline.

If you feel gaming is irrelevant, that's fine. And then I can also understand better why you couldn't give a flying F if you were locked out of all your PC games due to DRM (ie. DRM is irrelevant to you). I do care.

Well that I actually respect and all you really had to do was to say this in the first place, but it doesn't change the fact that Windows comparison is a terrible one, for loads of different reasons.

Basically, Windows was designed as an offline operating system from grouds-up, with added online functionality. Steam, on the other hand, was designed as an online authentication service, with store, offline mode, all the other crap as added functionality.

Vast majority of Windows customers will demand the OS to work offline. Vast majority of Steam customers won't demand for Steam to work offline. They're just so substantially different in their function, design background, target audience and functionality that you get to the toaster vs. car comparison - both are machines, but that doesn't mean they're comparable.

Long story short, if you want your gaming done offline only, it means Steam is just not a product targeted at you and not a product created for you - it sucks, but there are alternatives. If you have ever seen me claiming otherwise, it was probably a long time ago and I have changed my mind on the subject quite significantly in the meantime, but I don't think my opinion on this was ever different.

I'd expect Valve will make serious efforts to have offline mode be reliable now they want to get into the console market considering Microsoft has just recently faced a huge backlash over their proposed online check-in.

Unfortunately there aren't alternatives for many games and that's why I ended up using Steam although I don't like many things of it. However they offer the offline mode and they say in the message you linked that the offline mode is designed to be indefinite.

Maybe the only real difference to Windows is how many people are wanting the offline mode. How many Windows user would be okay with an almost always on default mode? There would be an outcry initially but maybe in the end they would be as happy as Steam. Steam can only be online if Windows is online too. So making Windows behaving like Steam should be easily doable. Microsoft should give it a try.

Man, Valve is one incompetent bunch. Now seriously, taking their position and all their resources into account they are friggin' awful. It's been ten years and they still haven't managed to get the offline mode to work properly nor have they fixed the in-game download stopping non-sense, as a matter of fact both things have gotten worse over the ten years. It blows my mind.

I'm not sure. There is no sign of a huge backlash regarding Steam. They don't seem to be loosing much money over it. I would rather assume that fixing the offline mode is not really their top priority with all the other interesting projects like Steam OS going on.

Well as pricey as that can get, you can still save up for a console. Not the best solution, but if you absolutely, positively don't want to put up with Steam... But yeah, platform exclusivity is not the best thing ever. I'm not sure who to blame for that, really - Valve was never 'buying everybody out', they just offered devs a great service. Devs, on the other hand, found the great service really convenient and started using in exclusively. By luring devs, Steam lured customers and, well, here we are. We'll see how harmful to the industry this status turns out to be, I'm quite curious about that myself.

I'm hoping that what happens now is that more and more services are going to try to outperform the 'other guy' in terms of convenience and support they're able to give to both devs and customers, that's the best outcome that we could get out of this.

I always wondered why nobody just copied Steams model (community profile, friends list, achievements, automatic updates, kind of offline mode) and made them direct competition. Origin, Uplay, GamersGate, Greenmangaming, ... my programming feeling tells me that making your own Steamworks equivalent library is doable. It definitely takes time especially to make it right, but hell, there are publishers out there commanding hordes of programmers....

They could have all the advantages including making the IP and withholding it from Steam and circumventing the 30% industry standard cut which would have paid for the expenses.

I'm hoping that the small guys (I include GOG in the small guys category) will stand a chance and not only the big guys will divide the market as has happened very often in history. But I'm not too optimistic about that.

Indefinite my ass. I mean, let's look at it completely sober: offline mode has been around since at least 2004, I don't know anyone who has been able to use it indefinitely, eventually Steam would just require you to log in. Valve has what has to be synonymous to an infinite money cheat by now. And it still doesn't work "as intended" because they lack something. Time? Technical know-how? Money? RAWFL.

And now let's take a look at what Valve is doing on the other end: the oh so generous Valve has introduced family sharing, a very restrictive system that allows you to borrow your whole library to a limited group of people, only one person at a time and you lose total access to your own library while doing so.

So let's compare these two things. The side effect of the offline mode is that potentially an infinite number of players can play single player games from one account at the same time. Valve's very own system for sharing games with others limits the access to one person at a time, excluding the library's owner. So how could Valve possibly want the offline mode to work? I really don't know. Considering all other things about Steam there's no way Valve actually wants the thing to work.

Well, first of all, GOG are most definitely not a 'small guy' anymore :-P They're one of the biggest online distributors out there. They just retain the 'small guys' image 'cause fans love it IMO.

Right, anyway, what I actually wanted to say is that if what you saying would happen, other distributors developing something akin to Steamworks, I would hope that the API would get standardized and any application working on Steamworks would also work with funture GOGworks, UbiWorks and whateverthehellotherWorks. Not going to happen tho. *sigh*

Actually, you want to be real? Valve has only ever really touched upon the subject of fixing it earlier this year. Other than that, I have never seen a promise of a working offline mode from them.

Yes, it's a pity although for the devs it would be easier then if there would be only a small number of APIs. I just meant that if you see that someone is successful than copying the product as good as possible is not the worst idea. It cannot be that much effort for GOG to have an optional profile page and friends list, just in case somebody needs it. Yet they never bothered.

And that Origin and Uplay are seen as so much lower in service as Steam is quite remarkable if you look at the sheer resources that EA and Ubisoft command.

So what, developers actually have to "promise" things specifically through press releases, else I am not allowed to complain about broken functionality?

Well you're complaining about indefinite, which has never even been implied - in fact, it has been said to not work by Valve themselves.

By that definition, 2.5 billion dollar equity Valve would still be the 'small guys', because there's ample love for Steam. ;)

The definition of 'big guys' and 'small guys' actually is pretty easy if you start comparing. Valve bags 70% market share in digital PC game distribution. Seventy effing percent!!! Divide the remaining 30 up among hundreds of competitors, and you'll see who the only biggie in the industry really is.

PC developers live or die hinging on the question whether they 'get on Steam'. Everything else is irrelevant. Especially the bigger developers can easily afford to reject gog.com as an additional distribution service, scared to death of DRM freedom and lack of international pricing. That's what makes gog.com the little guy, and I pray they will always be content in that role lest the lights of PC gaming will extinguish in Valve's console plans.