........System failure
The error European owners of Half-Life 2 received when trying to activate their game
It is necessary to validate every Steam game online before it can be launched,
although an offline mode is available. There are no alternate methods of activation such as via telephone or fax, which causes the system to deny access to those without Internet connections. According to the Steam Subscriber Agreement, Steam's availability is not guaranteed and Valve is under no legal obligation to release an update disabling the authentication system in the event that Steam becomes permanently unavailable.[46]
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[edit] Forced auto-updates
By default, to play a game offline, Steam and the game itself must be fully updated. When Steam starts online, the system checks to see if there are updates available. If there are, the user is forced to wait for update process to finish before being able to play again, though games can be streamed online.[48] These updates cannot be rolled back by the user, which prevents users with unusual or unrecognized issues reverting their software to its previous, functional state.
Steam can be set to stay offline and not attempt a connection,[49] but this offline mode has its own restrictions and limitations, including preventing games which have not been updated from running in offline mode.[50]
Auto-updating can be turned off by the user, on a game by game basis. Doing this will cause multiplayer games to not function due to the users version being out of date compared to both other users who took the update, and game servers. Choosing to update the game is possible without re-activating the auto-update feature..........
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Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
