On machines where you start Steam manually in order to play a game, do you keep Steam running in the background after play session is over? Meaning if you no longer play any game for the moment, and just keep it running to be ready. Or do you close Steam, after the play session?
Also, privacy and security. It’s just good practice not to autorun anything unless you absolutely have to, especially something with as much exposed “area” as a popular client with so many features.
This is a hot take, but I think the tendency to autorun Steam… familiarity?
People like Steam. It’s positive. It’s “on their side” and known, and it auto runs by default, so they aren’t particularly inclined to change that.
I could not care less about how I feel about Steam. I care about the resource utilization I measured and see with my two eyeballs, and I don’t like it one bit. Heck, I’d much rather it not run even while I’m gaming, if I can help it.
For me gaming is the only thing my computer does where the performance actually matters, in pretty much all other things I use it for the performance impact is imperceptible. The only time I might close it is if I was trying to run some benchmark or something.
I don’t like the overhead games either, TBH. This is why I try to buy GoG absolutely wherever I can; no launcher, no DRM, no overhead.
Unfortunately, a lot of games aren’t on GoG, or are even Steam-exclusive now…