Is there any way to start Steam in offline mode without logging in first?

Question

I recently find myself needing to start Steam in offline mode rather frequently (my wife is hogging my account to play Plants Vs. Zombies, and most of what I play doesn't really need to be online).

I was wondering if there is some way to launch Steam in offline mode without first logging in (and selecting it from the menu), since that usually beats the purpose.

While I know that killing my network connection before launching Steam is an option, I am looking for a more "civilized" way, such as a command line switch or something of the sort.

Answer

While Steam is starting up, you can hit "Cancel" and it will allow you to start offline mode from there. (I believe if you uncheck automatic sign-in you won't have to hit Cancel, but I'm not sure if that's still true for the current version). Apparently you may also be able to edit steam.cfg to do this: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=16112412&postcount=8

Edit: I can confirm that creating/editing steam.cfg (in the same directory as the steam executable) with the following lines works:

BootStrapperInhibitAll=enable
ForceOfflineMode=enable

If you want to manage this with a command-line parameter, you could create a script to do something like the following (Windows .bat file):

IF "%1"=="offline" (
    IF EXIST steam.cfgx (
        rename steam.cfgx steam.cfg
    )
) ELSE (
    IF EXIST steam.cfg (
        rename steam.cfg steam.cfgx
    )
)
start steam.exe

Check more discussion of this question.

loading..