Their DRM is optional, and many games on Steam are DRM free, meaning you can copy the files to another machine not running Steam and it would work just fine. And Steam’s DRM, if used, is the least annoying DRM out there IMO.
Less games actually use Steam’s DRM than people think. Even the ones that require Steam to run often just use their API for stuff like multiplayer functionality or displaying leaderboards.
There’s an open source library that you can sub in to emulate the API and run the games on LAN without Steam. I believe there’s no decryption involved so it should be 100% legal, just like how Proton reimplements Windows APIs.
Welcome to the gaming world! Pick your poison!
It’s either:
Steam is not perfect (it has DRM), but aside from that they’re cool
Their DRM is optional, and many games on Steam are DRM free, meaning you can copy the files to another machine not running Steam and it would work just fine. And Steam’s DRM, if used, is the least annoying DRM out there IMO.
I think there’s a point to be made with harm reduction too- valve makes their drm easy to use and seems to be on the less invasive side
Absolutely. Steam DRM existing likely doesn’t increase the number of devs using DRM, but it probably moves devs from worse DRM schemes.
Less games actually use Steam’s DRM than people think. Even the ones that require Steam to run often just use their API for stuff like multiplayer functionality or displaying leaderboards.
There’s an open source library that you can sub in to emulate the API and run the games on LAN without Steam. I believe there’s no decryption involved so it should be 100% legal, just like how Proton reimplements Windows APIs.