Steam – How to use Steam without connecting to Steam’s servers

steam

I'm not trying to hack anything here. To clarify my question, I'll give you the situation.

I'm an engineer who is also an avid gamer. Where I work, we get downtime from time to time where we engineers are basically just sitting and waiting for something to do. During this time, our boss (who is also an avid gamer) allows us to bring our laptops and connect to the company network.

The problem we have run into is that we cannot connect to the Steam servers because of the company's firewall. We can connect to Origin with no problem and even download games from it, but we can never access Steam's servers. We have tried a few things to get around it, but nothing successful so far. I guess what I am looking for is some way to get access to Steam's servers the same way I can access the Origin servers.

Best Answer

I believe your problem can mostly be circumvented by using Steam's offline-mode.

You say you have the game on "your laptop". I assume this is a personal laptop you can take home from time to time.

Here's what you do. In your home, with unhindered access to Steam, download the games you want and start them once. This way Steam can verify your right to run those games at least once. After this, put Steam to off-line mode. It will remember the verifications you did (for limited time, a couple of weeks, according to @badp) and you should be able to use the laptop and its Steam installation to play the games without needing to connect to the Steam's server.

Depending on the game, you may even have the game online without needing to connect to Steam's servers.

Related Solutions

Steam – How to use multiple Steam accounts without re-entering passwords

The Steam executable (Steam.exe on Windows) accepts a number of command line parameters; you could try taking advantage of those.

Specifically, this one, which starts Steam and immediately attempts to log in with the given credentials:

-login %u %p

This logs into Steam with the specified Username and Password combination. Replace %u with the username, and %p with the password you want to login with (Steam must be off for this to work).

And, since this doesn't work while Steam is running:

-shutdown

This shuts down (exits) Steam.

Steam – How to disable Steam from starting up with Windows without logging in to Steam

If you want to do this without starting Steam and logging in, you can modify the setting in the Windows registry. The autostart checkbox is directly tied to a registry key — simply deleting it is all the Steam client does when said checkbox is unchecked.

Navigate to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and delete the Steam key. Or as a .reg file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"Steam"=-

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Steam – How to use multiple Steam accounts without re-entering passwords

Steam – How to disable Steam from starting up with Windows without logging in to Steam

Related Topic