Sure, but my point is that I tried it without Steam running (most of the time seems spent on logging in to my account). I don't run Steam by default - it'll be updating, downloading patches, popping up notifications and all sorts interfering with my daily life.
That is neither the expected nor the standard use case. If you use a product in a way it's not designed to be used you shouldn't be surprised when it's behaves in a non-ideal fashion. Notifications and auto-update can be disabled.
That's completely unacceptable - the idea that I need to keep a background app running at all times just so I can play a game once or twice a month. Imagine if all apps took such an arrogant approach; our machines would barely run under the weight of the cruft. I similarly avoid Intel installers when using their drivers because they also like to install and keep running a half dozen services and widgets. Same thing with iTunes - I use a shell script to start it up so it can start up all the extra services and kill them later after iTunes exits.
There's a lot of entitled software out there that arrogantly assumes sovereignty over your machine. I don't accept it.
