Preorder delivery is encrypted, yeah. However, they also have bits in Steam-delivered games that can check for a valid Steam session, terminate the game session

Preorder delivery is encrypted, yeah. However, they also have bits in Steam-delivered games that can check for a valid Steam session, terminate the game session if the Steam session is lost, and the like. I don't think they'll be shipping some of those components because they wouldn't want to enable people building custom Steam installs that just stub out the DRM features.