Half-Life 2; If Steam, then why the CD-Protection?

[StrangerGuy]

What is the use of all these cd-check crap when game companies already have the greatest (IMO) anti-piracy mechanism in place: CD-Keys. It is not like cd-checks and the steam crap etc is going to stop or piracy, it is only going to trouble the legal game owners.

 

[Davegod]

Mostly offtopic but not worth making a new thread about:

How do i turn off the automatic updates for HL2? in the Steam Game Launcher properties, CS:S is set not to auto update, but HL2 is, and even though it appears it is a selection from a pull-down selection box, i cant actually open the box or see anything else to disable autoupdates?

Also, if you do disable autoupdates can you then select what bits to update? I.e. i'd like the "general fixes" but not the new multiplayer, and would probably prefer neither than both - when I'm downloading down 64k wire.

 

[BWZeus]

It seems you cannot turn off the auto update feature aside from running in "offline-mode". As a matter of fact Steam actually re-authenticates several times online while actually running the game!!! A bit much I would say...