My anecdotal experience from using steam for about 12 years is not this at all, excepting that it launches on boot and you can trivially turn that off in the settings. It uses bandwidth only so much as to download updates for games and you can stop games from updating though I don&#x27;t really understand why you&#x27;d do that. Certainly I&#x27;ve never experienced it eating up resources; right now it&#x27;s eating under 100MB of system resources.<p>The only bandwidth-related frustration I&#x27;ve experienced is when Steam&#x27;s client updates itself because it&#x27;s an invisible background task and occurs at relatively random times. That can cause some frustrations when I am playing a game and wonder where the lag&#x27;s coming from.