I disagree, I think Gabe does genuinely believe service alone can prevent piracy. Steamworks DRM is opt-in for developers and easily broken (which we have to as

I disagree, I think Gabe does genuinely believe service alone can prevent piracy. Steamworks DRM is opt-in for developers and easily broken (which we have to assume is intentional because Valve definitely has the means to make something stronger). People like to assume that a game being on Steam automatically equates to it having DRM, but there are a number of games in my library that can be copied to a thumb stick or any other drive once they're installed and work fine forever just like you would do with a GOG game. The existence of Steamworks always seemed more like a placebo to ease developers onto the platform than anything.