Valve did not take AAA games out of shops. The fact that they have a good platform and makes people more likely to want to choose them, still leaves the decision to join Steam up to the potential user. You choose to use Steam and that's your responsibility, too. No one is 'forcing' anyone to do anything. Games stored, not installed, on the external, and moved to the internal when you want to play a certain game.

You can manage the games as I said above. You don't even have to keep 200 games installed all the time, at the same time. That's up to you how you do that, not Steam or Valve. It's how you are managing your computer's space or hardware use there.

The ability to use the games or not has nothing to do with Steam in this case. Not to mention the amount of money they make. For a program that started by forcing the world to use their platform by taking triple A games out of the shops I sure would think they'd have the sense to do something about it.

Originally posted by Phase_verocity:okay so basically i just can't use the games i've paid for when i don't have the drive plugged in or I have to reinitialize all 200 or so games.

External hard drive steam