I had resisted going on Steam for a very long time due to my doubts about overpowered players in the market, but as we all know, after a while there came the first eagerly awaited game that was not available anywhere else.

I never became happy with Steam, its restrictions, the 90s interface and continued to try to avoid the store as much as possible. Accordingly, I purchased most games on GOG due to not-so-substantial restrictions and was reasonably happy with ‘Galaxy’ for a long time.

But then came August 2022 and with it version 2.0.53. At GOG they now thought it was a great idea to copy Steam & Ubi’s restriction of keeping games up to date: Scheduling game updates for installed games you’re not actively playing, as they call it in the changelog. In practice? Complete bullshit. Not even Train Valley, which I played at least once a week and already for over 100 hours, gets updated without me manually triggering the update via ‘Downloads’. Except for Epic Games, this anti-customer practice seems to be common practice everywhere by now.

So what I would love to have: A script/tool that opens the Steam, GOG and Microsoft Store windows, starts all the updates, watches them, and shuts down or puts the computer on standby when the updates are complete. Start when you go out, return home to play. Does anyone know of anything like this perhaps? Or would anyone know where to suggest something like this?

  • poVoq
    link
    fedilink
    11 year ago

    There is SteamCMD that allows you to write a simple script to do what you want with Steam AFAIK.

    But to be honest I am a bit confused as I am much more annoyed about automatic updates being forced by Steam all the time for single-player games that work perfectly fine already.

    • OliverOP
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      21 year ago

      You’re free to turn them off in the settings, I’m unable to switch them on? I have no idea how this algorithm decides in which case I’ll get the next update tomorrow, in a week or three.

      Sure, in case of single-player games the way they’ve been years ago that’s fine. I primarily mean games for which the latest version is necessary anyway, at least for the purpose of competition. You supposedly just start a game and then it says ‘Update is being downloaded…’ again. If the game is only stored in containers, it can take up to 5 minutes at almost 100% load until a game is ready. I would really like to postpone this to the time when I am absent.