That third-party package being Steam itself? Only real limitation as far as i see, is that you must have internet connection, and that's not even true always. Offline playing works aswell sometimes.
You must have alot of trojans on your computer It doesn't break, and all of the things you mention are configurable. Downloads are games auto-update features which you can disable per game, but are you sure you want to play old version? Popup you mean is propably steam overlay notification, but you can disable the entire overlay. Don't know other popups, took off friend status notifications long ago if such were ever on.
Anyways, does Steam even have Pascal API or something?
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