this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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Games sold on Steam are not required to use Steam's DRM. There are lots of DRM free games on Steam. Steam is only required to be installed to purchase/download them but not to run them. After download, the game files can be copied and ran on any computer without any verification.
They don't make it clear which games have steam DRM and which games have nothing at all, they only list it if it's a third party solution like denuvo.
So they're not DRM free then if you need Steam to download them. You also need to be connected to the internet at least once to confirm ownership, so even if you download it once and think that you can now just transfer the game from one PC to another without an internet connection or without Steam, you can't.
DRM free and actual ownership means physical. The closest you'll get to that with digital games is through GOG or Itch.io or anything similar where you can download the actual install files and you don't need any launcher at all.
You can purchase the game in a web browser and use steamcmd, which (one could argue is still requiring an app) to download and install. In cases where the publisher is not invoking DRM (Larian games like BG3, DoS2, etc. for instance) once the game is downloaded you can certainly archive it and transfer it to another machine and run it there without Steam. In the end you are likely purchasing proprietary software (though again it's not always the case on Steam) and we could say you don't really own that either, so maybe take your complaints to the publishers or just use the power of your wallet and not buy those games and support libre games, of which there are many, another way. That said, Valve is actively making things better for users by developing and contributing to useful libre software like Proton (WINE, DXVK, etc) that can work outside of Steam.
once you downloaded the game you can copy it into a pendrive, upload it into mega or whatever storage and use it. I don't get why y'all get so held up at the fact that steam might stop offering infinite downloads. Once you have downloaded the game you are free to burn it or store it wherever! This is different from streaming music for example, since with music you never have a local copy you can work with.
You can. I have several games where I can literally copy the game folder into another computer, press the executable and be able to play it offline. Terraria, vampire survivors, stardew valley, pathfinder: WOTR, Grim Dawn, AoE2... And more. I literally have "backup" zips of several path versions of grim dawn to play different mods because I'm too lazy to patch the game each time I want to replay different versions.
Once the game it's in your system it's as physical as it can get. There's no difference of storage in your disk, a pendrive, an external drive or an optical CD. You give the example of GoG, there's plenty games in steam that once "installed" have all the files in the game folder and you can easily move them.