It was the game only.

Is the content of the "Info about Steam" dialog box meaningful, i.e. is the Steam paket version 1374006490 or anything else there equivalent to a client version number?

I assume you mean the "About Steam" dialog? It should have a built date as well, which currently is December 3.

Reports are very conflicting though, and I personally was offline for 6 months with no issue. I believe Valve when they say it's a bug.

When I moved house beginning of August had no internet for just over 2 weeks.

Once PC was setup after a shutdown with Steam active online previously I had no issues at all, fired straight up in offline mode and stayed that way without problems for the duration.

When it refuses to go offline if there has been an update that you don't do I believe that is where it will force the update and not allow offline mode as it knows about the update.

It can be a little buggy at times but in most cases it works just fine

That's pretty much what this whole thread boils down to.

Yeah, completely agree

Valve will get it sorted. In all fairness it works one hell of a lot better than it used to a few years ago where it was nigh on impossible to go offline and stay that way.

It's nice to hear about it also working. I guess most players never really test this mode extensively. I wonder how often the bug bites. Maybe I'll repeat the experiment and report back.

The offline mode seems to work the best for the people who rarely or never use it. Like StingingVelvet keeps repeating his old success story with it from a few years ago, as if it was somehow relevant today.

It is irrelevant to me why the Steam client refuses me to play the games in offline mode. If it is because I was yesterday online with that computer and Steam got a notification of upcoming client update, and that is why it now refuses to let me go to offline mode when I don't have internet... I still can't play my games in offline mode.

It simply shouldn't refuse the offline mode, ever. As simple as that. If it does, then it is broken. No need to try to defend it being broken.

That's not enough. It have to work always.

Oh, that was so dramatic! You should get a prize for pointing out that software should always work without bugs hindering its use - please, somebody, inform the software companies, they don't know yet!

Come again?

It is more dramatic in cases where a failure in a software prevents you from using the system at all, or lots of applications behind it.

Steam client refusing to sometimes work in offline mode is more similar to if Windows logon would sometimes decide not to work, just because you are not connected to internet or it can't at the time connect to MS servers. Then you couldn't use any software at all on your computer. People expect the "Windows offline mode" to work always, so it isn't enough to say that most of the times it works and only sometimes fails.

That is different from just one application occasionally refusing to working, especially if it is not due to an extra layer like DRM which doesn't benefit the end-user in any way..

Then again, I've never seen Windows requiring internet access in its minimal requirements. It's right there in those of Steam - that's why your comparison is flawed. You can spew fire all you want, but you can't claim Valve's not straightforward in this - and then they have added an offline mode, which is reliable for the most part, on top of that. I have to remind you that they didn't actually have to either add or patch it to a fairly functional state, people would still use Steam regardless of that (see some other platforms) - but they did.

It's kind of like I went forward and said it's unacceptable that Far Cry 3 doesn't work on Pentium 1 with 16 megs of RAM - yeah, it's not intended to.

Of course, there's also comparison of a software that's essential to your computer working properly to software that's ... Well, not. It's like comparing broken car to a broken toaster.

I think the point is not about software reliability, but more against DRM getting in the way of user's rights. At least that's my opinion. It always bothers me how Steam makes the offline mode so impractical.

I'm fully aware of what it was supposed to be, and found it quite silly, with bolding of all important bits and everything. Yeah, we get it, you're not using Steam because it has an online requirement, don't need to repeat it over and over and over again.