offline steam, no internet how long?

[BlackDragon05(dragonmaster)]

I am planing to put a low spec pc out in my man cave for some older pc gaming. If i setup steam, install the few games I want to run that will run in offline mode will this game forever or will I need to let steam connect to the internet every so often to re enable offline play? I have found conflicting answers.

[Mad Scientist]

I'm not sure anymore, but an easy solution if you have a wireless router is using either a PCIE WiFi card or USB WiFi adapter, of which you can at least connect to the internet with if needed to actually connect.

I haven't tried long-term offline play, so I am very uncertain of this.

It should always work, unless there is any third-party DRM that requires you to be online after X amount of days to refresh the legitimacy of the game copy or something.

[[N]ebsun]

There is a time limit.. I forgot how long, but I think 90 days?

[JacquesPatat]

not sure of time frame, but with my experience where i was for a period without internet, couple months i could play offline, until it refused to log in, until i went online. think it was about 3 or 4 months before it started to give me problems.

[Kronos]

The Time frame is a week, after that you have to login to prove refresh. If you have no internet, try using your phone's internet every week to refresh login using wifi hotspot/usb tethering.

[Ogami]

Originally posted by Aniki:

The Time frame is a week, after that you have to login to prove refresh. If you have no internet, try using your phone's internet every week to refresh login using wifi hotspot/usb tethering.

Thats definitely not true. My longest time in offline mode without any internet connection at all was like 5 months.
SOME games might need periodic connections to verifiy ownership, depending on the DRM.
But overall you can stay in offline mode indefinitely as long as you dont delete the cookie with your login credentials on your system.

[Kronos]

Originally posted by Ogami:

Originally posted by Aniki:

The Time frame is a week, after that you have to login to prove refresh. If you have no internet, try using your phone's internet every week to refresh login using wifi hotspot/usb tethering.

Thats definitely not true. My longest time in offline mode without any internet connection at all was like 5 months.
SOME games might need periodic connections to verifiy ownership, depending on the DRM.
But overall you can stay in offline mode indefinitely as long as you dont delete the cookie with your login credentials on your system.

That's pretty weird, I was offline for 2 months back in 2019 and remember having to log in almost every week. Maybe I had some program installed that would clear the cookies. I'm not sure.

[BlackDragon05(dragonmaster)]

Seems I will have to play with it and make online an option just in case. Thanks.

[[SK] Kaldaien]

Every 2 weeks, Steam's authentication sessions will expire. This only matters for games that use server-side Steam DRM (e.g. Denuvo). This 2 week limitation used to apply to all games on Steam, but was patched out of Steam's client-side DRM in ~2013.