Du@lGeEk

Steam , is a software that has been developed by Valve to avoid piracy and provide automatic updates to your games.
When you do your first install of a Valve game , you have to install Steam, or you won't be play able to play Valve games.
To play games that use Steam you have to have Internet(for product activation), but after , you can run steam in offline mode(you can take your pc to your friends house to activate the game and then play without Internet in your house).
Steam is also very Slow because there is always lots of people connected, and that makes the downloads very slow(games connections have priority in theyre servers [i think]), but even if it takes a lot of time to update Steam or download the files , don't desperate.It wil take more time to restart,than to download the rest.
Even if the progress bar doesn't get filled from time to time . let the program run, he takes some time to finish the download.
I hope this FAQ helps.

Edit: here a link for Kattanas debunking Steam thread.

gonX

Grammar should be fixed, and a bit line-changing would be great too.
But you're actually just pointing out the obvious, but some doesn't know that it avoids piracy (Oh yeah! Not).

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