way to exit steam while playing games

[weltandmelt]

( could someone help) i itd be nice if there a way to exit steam while playing games, so steam isnt open.

[zachjd]

You can set your status to Offline. Or you're trying to accomplish something else?

[weltandmelt]

my computer is prety bad so i was hoping to save the computers prosecess by having as little as i can up at a time

[zachjd]

Steam will close the game running with it.
Maybe try this but I don't know if it has any affect.
Open Task Manager and click Processes.
Right click Steam.exe and set priority to Low.

[weltandmelt]

ya i figured there probably wasnt a way to do it, that kind of sucks

[cyanic]

If a game is Steamworks, you typically can't just stop Steam (because of achievements, Workshop, multiplayer matchmaking, etc.). However, certain games on Steam don't use Steamworks and don't have any other DRM, so those games you could actually launch outside of Steam. A couple of games are Steamworks but forgiving about not having Steam running, but those are very rare.

[Kamikaze]

Maybe you can just stay Offline which will save some memory since in won't be using internet, but than you won't be able to play any mode online.
Or Just start Steam on Offline Mode but that sucks 'cause it won't record your gameplay time.
For example, I traveled in January but I didn't have internet. So I had to play the games I bought on Christmas offline and it didn't record my gameplay time. It says I have only 2 hours of Far Cry 2, but I'm sure I played at least 9 or 10 hours in offline mode.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Being able to close Steam while a game is running would be nice, especially for lower-end computers. I've wanted to do this before.

Unfortunately, Steam's wrapper DRM works by forcing Steam to be open and logged on while a game is running.

There are some games that don't have Steam wrapper DRM, but they're not listed and you'll have to check them yourself. I think someone else might have a list somewhere, but last I checked it wasn't completely up-to-date. But for these games, you can run them directly from the executable without having Steam running.

But yeah, if you really need to minimize the number of processes running, buy DRM-free games, from places like GOG.com (all DRM-free), Humble Store (make sure DRM-free is specified), or GamersGate (make sure DRM-free is specified).