Also, privacy and security. It’s just good practice not to autorun anything unless you absolutely have to, especially something with as much exposed “area” as a popular client with so many features.

I recently saw lot of YouTube people saying they always run it in the background (because of the defense about Steam starting slow, versus the new Epic Games launcher).

This is a hot take, but I think the tendency to autorun Steam… familiarity?

People like Steam. It’s positive. It’s “on their side” and known, and it auto runs by default, so they aren’t particularly inclined to change that.

I could not care less about how I feel about Steam. I care about the resource utilization I measured and see with my two eyeballs, and I don’t like it one bit. Heck, I’d much rather it not run even while I’m gaming, if I can help it.

I’m not downvoting anyone here, but I will say just because you don’t notice, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an effect.

I have a 7800X3D, 3090, 128GB RAM, NVMe SSD, all tuned and running on a “stripped down” Windows install, and I used some benchmarking scripts for Stellaris and Modded Minecraft that I already used for other stuff. Background churn absolutely affected frame time consistency (hitching) and simulation speed.

I imagine it would be even more dramatic for a game that saturates the whole CPU, like Cyberpunk 2077 or something, though I have not tested that empirically. And this testing was on Windows; certain schedulers on Linux (like CachyOS offers) might handle background churn better, though there will always be a tradeoff.