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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

Uhhhh... Steam needs a decent startup time. I only play computer games about once a month. When I click on the link on my desktop, Steam always takes 5-10 minutes to update itself.

This is ridiculous. I never have this problem with games on my Nvidea Shield.

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How many updates does the Shield itself and the games on there get per month? I know Android automatically updates apps in the background, just like iOS; if you have Steam autostart in the background (which I do),the startup time becomes negligible and the updates unnoticeable.

But that's the benefits of PC gaming, you get the choice on whether or not to have things start up and keep updated in the background - and if you choose not to, you end up with a situation like that.

I think it's pretty cool that they have a development pipeline that allows for frequent releases.

This particular problem is shared by every game distribution mechanism that exists. Xbox One, PS4, Steam, Origin, UPlay, all of them.

Even stand-alone installs (which are stupidly rare these days) auto-update themselves on first load.

I just wish to understand why they need an application update so often to what should be a simple distribution product. Do they hard code item availability or such?

There have been 12 updates in the last 12 months - do you really consider that to be "so often"?

Anyway, there's a detailed changelog[1] for all the updates, so you can have a look at the kinds of things they change.

[1] http://www.steampowered.com/platform/update_history/index.ph...

A fair number of those updates go out 2 or 3 times with little fixes but the same "release notes," so that's not a particularly accurate count of the number of times Steam will want to update.

Ah, the good ole, "I could write that in a weekend" :)

Steam has a:

- bundled web browser

- a messaging client with a decent set of features

- the whole "simple distribution product"

- probably tons of other things I'm forgetting right now

- and everything included is obviously network facing, ergo vulnerabilities, ergo security patches

Steam's startup time is completely reasonable.

What would a reasonable time for startup be in your eyes beyond 5-10 minutes before you play your games once a month? 1 minute? Instant?

I would prefer it if the update is unimportant if it downloaded it while steam was running and installed it when it starts up next time. But at least for me I seem to always have to wait for a download, which is especially annoying when trying to play with friends

If you leave Steam running in the background that's exactly what happens, and it does the same for any games installed.

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