If you don&#x27;t let Steam run in the background, then of course it&#x27;s not going to be able to update games in the background. The delay in launching games is thus at least partly self-inflicted. And Steam certainly has justifications other than DRM for being strict about keeping games up to date: any networked game will probably need to match the version of the server, and in general it&#x27;s good policy for Steam to trust developers have good reasons for pushing out updates.<p>There are also Steam games that don&#x27;t use Steam&#x27;s DRM and can be run without Steam. It&#x27;s up to the individual game developers whether to include the DRM.