Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: About Valve's Steam System, looks like they fixed the Internet problem

[quote name="Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS)"]In the game reviews section of this website there is a video of me complaining how you could not play any of the single-player games Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode 1, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Garry's Mod, and Portal unless you have a working Internet connection. I pointed out that if Valve ever went out of business or its servers failed or became unreachable, your game was now useless. I pointed out the "phone home" behavior was unnecessary because the games are single player, not cooperative. It's an entirely different thing with Counter-Strike or Team Fortress 2, those are cooperative or combative multi-player games and need an Internet connection to link with the other players. I doubt it was my complaint, it was probably from many others, but in one of the upgrades they've changed this so that the games that are single player can now be played even if your Internet connection is down, you can play in "off-line" mode. This was not a capacity it had before, if you had no Internet connection available, you got a message that your game could not be played at that time. [/quote]