Don't get me wrong. I love gaming on my computer, I don't own any consoles except for my 3DS so my gaming rig is where all the magic happens! I like to use a keyboard and mouse rather than a controller, I prefer the better graphics a computer can provide compared to it's console brothers and I prefer the, in my opinion, better games available such as Rust, Cities, Counter Strike and many more. This is why I love PC gaming.

This is why I hate PC gaming. Most of my time is consumed when at work and on a night time; I like to see my girlfriend, she comes to my house or I go to hers and then I normally get home around 11pm and go to sleep. On the odd occasion I book days off from work where the other half is at work and all I really want to do is have a couple hours gaming although this is never that simple.

I wake up at a late hour (it's my day off of course) and I fire up my gaming rig, boot up steam, oh. wait. I have a GPU driver update to do - 20 minutes later finished - boot up steam and steam client needs an update - 10 minutes later it's finished - finally steam loads and I want to play some games, no stop I can't. Steam now wants to update all the games in my library which is going to take around 6 hours to complete and while this is happening no one else can use the internet and stops me from playing online due to it maxing out my connection... So normally I end up turning off my computer at this point not bothered anymore.

I could leave my gaming machine on over night although it uses an unnecessary amount of power just to download a couple of games and I'd need to leave it on all the time to make sure it stay up to date for the 80% of the time I'm not using it.

I could limit my steam client to a certain download speed to enable me to still use the internet, but with only 700kbps to play with the best configuration to me is limiting it to around the 200kbps range to make sure the internet is still fairly usable which almost quadruples the time of which it will take to download all the updates which is unreasonable to say the least.

I thought I'd finally cracked it, I went and got myself a little Acer server NUC that uses next to no power and can be left on all the time so I logged into my Steam Library and download all my steam library to it, I set the steam client to run at start up on my NUC and set it to only auto update between 2am and 9am, this time seemed best as most people aren't using the internet between these times.

Bring on yesterday where I purchased the new Tomb Raider and downloaded it to my NUC's hard drive the night before so that I can play it today by transferring over the files from my NUC to my Gaming rig fairly quickly and for some reason Steam after 'Checking already installed files' decides it wants to download the full 18GB all over again.

I am now trying the backup feature to see if this will work and if not there's another game that will probably never be played because I don't have the time, internet connection speeds or a bulging wallet to fund the constant running of a gaming rig to keep these games updated to the latest version.

Why has an issue like this never been addressed!? Back in the day I would buy the game and then crack it to ensure it never needed to be updated again so I could play it when I wanted to. I did this with GTA4 bought the game on Steam but also had a cracked version so I feel as though I'm still supporting the PC gaming industry because I do prefer it but also be able to play it when I wanted to avoid the constant updating. This worked well for me until they've bought out Denuvo a new type of DRM that has stopped crackers in their tracks, I know some people used this just to get a free game but this was not me and now I feel I am suffering due to the actions of others.

It's a huge shame and I'm just so disappointed with the whole experience. To the people of Steam if you ever read this... please find a solution even a LAN updating Caching Server would be great but for some odd reason this has never been looked into despite the numerous suggestions on your community page not to mention you can't even contact the company unless it's about billing.

I suppose though what once used to be an open gaming community where customers and developers would happily work with one another has now become a locked down and restrictive service only meant for constant hardcore gamers that have the time to get around the niggles. As a result (and I never thought I'd say this) I'm starting to question how long I'll still be a PC gamer.