Do you mean that you put steam into offline mode or are you just launching a game outside of steam so that steam gets started? When you restart how are you restarting steam?
Here is how it goes:
This is expected, although not quite sensible, long-standing behavior (and on all platforms). Steam restarts itself with the same command line and in the case of a game implicitly starting Steam that'll include the game start, thus the game is started every time Steam restarts. This is a real bug but we won't have a fix for it any time soon.
@kisak-valve Ok so... granted my ticket was a duplicate but...
13 YEARS seems acceptable for y'all for such a simple issue to be on standby? For the love of Gabe, get someone to vibe code some fixes for issues that have been around for over a decade!
Nothing extracted yet.
This isn't too big an issue, but if you start steam in offline mode by running a game, when restarted it will launch the game again. Only real issue is heavier games that take up some resources to start.