I am a fairly frequent Steam user. There are about 30 or so games on my account, close to half of them being retail games. Some of the big titles of last year are still on my pile of shame. So when lightning took out my network card a few days ago, I reckoned it was a good opportunity to put some time into those Steam single player games I’ve been neglecting.

But that was easier said than done. While Steam has something called Offline Mode, to be used when you can’t or don’t want to go online, it simply would not work. If my Steam client could talk, the conversation might have gone somewhere along the following lines:

Me: I’d like to play some games. Please start up.
Steam: Starting up… Hang on. I can’t connect to the Steam servers. Please check your Internet connection.
Me: Oh yes. Network card is busted. Sorry about that. Please start in offline mode.
Steam: I need to connect to the Steam servers. Please check your Internet connection.
Me: There is no Internet right now. Can’t you just activate offline mode?
Steam: I’m sorry Alex, I can’t do that.

That’s right. Steam refused to activate its offline mode, because it could not go online. Mildly irritated now, I opened up Google (on a different device, mind you) to find out what the hassle was. On the Steam support pages, I found the instructions to make Offline mode work. Some excerpts follow:

“Offline Mode allows you to play games through Steam without reconnecting to the Steam Network every time you wish to play – this is particularly useful if you do not plan on playing over the internet and would prefer not to download new updates for your single-player games.

Please note that you must connect to the Steam Network and test each of the games you would like to use in Offline Mode at least once to set up your account and configure Offline Mode on your machine.”

Long story short, in order to activate Steam’s offline mode, you have to be online. If you suddenly find yourself without Internet access and haven’t prepared according to what Steam dictates, you’re cut off from the games you bought and paid for. This includes retail games that you bought in a box and which use Steam.

This wouldn’t be too much of an issue, if those instructions weren’t flawed to begin with.

A quick search on the Steam support forums reveals a number of issues with Steam’s offline mode. The required preparation is not a once-off thing, unless, of course, you do it once and never go online with Steam again.

Otherwise, whenever Steam feels that it needs to be updated at the time you find yourself offline or would like to use offline mode – it will not work until you get back online. Since the whole process of updating Steam and its games is very transparent and happens without any user intervention, it’s hard to tell at any point whether offline mode will work the next time you boot your PC or not.

Among digital delivery services and systems with heavy online integration, this is pretty much unheard of. My X360 and my PS3 don’t moan at me when they can’t go online. They pretty much let me do what I want. On the PC, Games for Windows Live and Origin – services considered way inferior to Steam – are similarly transparent. Even the iOS platform, where pretty much everything happens through digital delivery, has no issues with me being offline while using it.

So why does Steam, generally recognized as the best digital delivery service for PC games, have such hang-ups? One could come up with a bunch of ideas, many of them firmly located in the Cloudcuckooland of conspiracy theories. Best case scenario, it’s a glitch that Valve couldn’t be too bothered to fix because those who actually have problems with it aren’t moaning loud enough.

Worst case scenario, it’s about control. Since the system can’t tell what the user is doing in an ‘uncontrolled’ offline scenario – and there’s a number of things one could be doing – they’d rather err on the side of caution and don’t let you do anything.

Whatever theory you prefer – the fact that Steam is so obviously willing to cut me off from games I paid for, because I didn’t follow their instructions to ‘prepare’ offline mode, leaves a sour aftertaste in my mouth.

Offline mode should work, period. When I tell the system to go offline, it should do that, no questions asked. Anyone can find themselves cut off from the Internet at any point in time, without warning. An offline mode that requires you to be online for it to work kind of defeats the purpose.