There are a few of these and Goldberg is my preferred method. Most games that enforce a check beyond this default are also trivially bypassed with another appli

There are a few of these and Goldberg is my preferred method. Most games that enforce a check beyond this default are also trivially bypassed with another application that simply rips the validation out in the first place. 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.)