Try it without steam installed, I think most of them still load steam.dll if steam is not actively running.
https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator/blob/master...
It's easy to test, just exit Steam and try to launch the game (.exe) with Goldberg installed. If Steam doesn't open, it's working.
There are also quite a few games that don’t institute any validation and will happily run without steam at all. It’s up to the developer to enable either level of validation and many don’t.
The only games on steam that have any meaningful DRM are the ones that go out of their way to do so. Nothing about steam is actually meant to serve as DRM that is more than paper thin. Valve tried to make a push a lot time ago with the custom executable generation technology around the time Civ 5 came out (2010) and it didn’t hold up for long and the appetite was not there.
Broadly speaking only Denuvo and very niche solutions for obscure games that are completely homespun (so the demand just isn’t there for people to properly crack them) are the only pure DRM being used on steam now.
(I own over 1500 games on steam to be clear, I do however often pirate games to try them out because 2 hours is a pretty narrow window for most games, especially the ones I enjoy. I buy what hooks me.)
> It doesn't break any DRM. If the game has a protection that doesn't let you use a custom steam api dll it needs to be cracked before you use my emulator. Steam is a DRM as much as any API is a DRM. Steam has actual DRM called steamstub which can easily be cracked but this won't crack it for you.
That being said looks like steam themselves don't consider their DRM to be very useful
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.