Steam Games Frequently Pausing/Hanging/Freezing

[DocSpit]

This problem started just a few days ago. Games that I've installed/launched through the steam client have developed a rather frustrating issue where they will frequently just sort of 'hang', but in a peculiar way. The game isn't always 'frozen' in any way that I've ever experienced, because they'll continue to respond to certain controls (AC Odyssey, for example, still lets me move the camera around, access the character menu; but all action is paused with the sound still working).

These 'freezes' last for about 10-30 seconds, but happen every minute or so.

Similar issues have happened with every steam game that I've tried to play, from newer games like Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Origins, to much older titles like Medieval II: Total War.

I'm hesitant to think this is a problem with my hardware or drivers, however, because any games I have that aren't associated with steam at all still seem to be working just fine. World of Warships, Star Citizen, and Star Wars Old Republic don't experience anything like this; and Star Citizen is up there on the higher end of the hardware demanding spectrum.

These freezes seem to happen even if I bypass the steam client itself and use the game launcher straight from the file directory.

I've spent the last couple of days searching for people reporting similar issues and trying their fixes, like reinstalling steam, validating game files, clearing caches, and so on, but nothing has resolved the issue; and I have yet to find anyone else reporting having trouble running ONLY the games they've gotten through steam, with everything else working just fine.

If anyone has any other suggestions that I can try to resolve this issue, I'd appreciate them...

[NanePye]

I'm sorry to hear you struggle with this issue.

Do you participate in steam beta? If not try it, if you are already, then do the opposite

Try turning off steam overlay in game and running steam as an admin

Did you try defragmenting your hdd?

Maybe the freezes are happening because of files being everywhere on your hdd, so you can try that if you haven't.

[DocSpit]

I don't participate in the beta.
I went ahead and turned off the overlays and set steam to run as an admin.
Cleaned and defragged all my SSDs, even the ones that didn't have the game files.

Unfortunately, the problem still seems to persist...

[Phantom]

You may have some conflicting software.

To test, boot your PC in safemode and test your games.

[DocSpit]

Safemode seems to turn off all of my video drivers, which rolls back any game I play to about 3 fps, so it's hard to tell if it's resolved the 'pausing' issue in the first place...

I certainly didn't make any software changes to my machine between when everything was working fine last week, and when the problem developed; so I'm skeptical if that could be the issue anyway.

In fact, one of the solutions that I tried was restoring my computer to an earlier state.