Stardew Valley, Terraria, and Starbound, to name a few I’m pretty sure are DRM free (Starbound I’m certain of). Probably plenty of others, but I haven’t tested. To see if a game requires steam, literally just install the game on Steam, copy the game folder out of the Steam install path, close steam, and launch the game.
It looks like they miss out on the Steamworks features “(e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.)” if they opt not to use their DRM, so I can understand why the vast majority of devs would want to use it.
You can actually pick and choose which parts of the steamworks api to implement, so you can have trading cards, multiplayer etc without the drm side.
from memory, i think you do need to use the drm to use family sharing, we had issue with that when we chose not to use the drm, but everything else we could implement fine without it.
Steam’s DRM is completely optional and is among the least intrusive DRMs available for developers to use. Many games are sold 100% DRM-free on Steam.
I don’t know of a single game on/from Steam that doesn’t require Steam to run. Thats DRM.
Stardew Valley, Terraria, and Starbound, to name a few I’m pretty sure are DRM free (Starbound I’m certain of). Probably plenty of others, but I haven’t tested. To see if a game requires steam, literally just install the game on Steam, copy the game folder out of the Steam install path, close steam, and launch the game.
It is entirely up to the developer if they want to use it though. It is not mandatory for a developer to use Steam DRM even if publishing on Steam.
Kerbal Space Program 1, at least used to not require steam running at all. I havent tried in a while, but it was supposed to stay that way.
It looks like they miss out on the Steamworks features “(e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.)” if they opt not to use their DRM, so I can understand why the vast majority of devs would want to use it.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
You can actually pick and choose which parts of the steamworks api to implement, so you can have trading cards, multiplayer etc without the drm side.
from memory, i think you do need to use the drm to use family sharing, we had issue with that when we chose not to use the drm, but everything else we could implement fine without it.
Ah I didn’t realise that, thanks. The overview page made it seem like the DRM was required for any of that to work.
Oh wow that is interesting. So the vast majority of devs just choose to lock it to the steam.exe?
yep yep, exactly this. For whatever reason suits them, be it drm or others, pretty much everyone who publishes on steam does choose to do so