Yeah, sadly this is true if you care about online gaming. Even games on GOG often rely on their client or some other form of online service for their multiplaye

Yeah, sadly this is true if you care about online gaming. Even games on GOG often rely on their client or some other form of online service for their multiplayer functionality. I think this is largely because people over the years learned to rely on external servers instead of the earlier P2P approach like what was used in the 90s Quake games where at best you'd have a central server that listed people's but that was optional and you could avoid it. It was quite an eye opening experience when i noticed several complains at an online forum years ago about a game not coming out of the box with dedicated servers and only allowing P2P connections - essentially people were asking for a game to be tied on a company's servers that would inevitable shut down when the game ceased to be profitable. But at least for single player games things are much better. Personally i do not care about online gaming so i tend to forget this :-P. And yeah some games (though it is far from the majority) aren't easy to remove the steam dependencies from (btw all you need are some open source tools, no need to rely on shady alternative DLLs or EXEs). This is why i only buy games on Steam when the price is very low, like less than $10 (and that for games i really like, for other games i might not buy them unless they're less than $5), so that if i cant remove the dependency it wont be that much of a loss to me and i'd still get to play the game in short term. Lately i usually just wait for a GOG or itch.io release though, unless it is some weird indie game that most likely wont appear on GOG or itch.io anyway.