I don’t disagree in principal but what exactly is the alternative? Playing SuperTuxKart and Pingus or some other open source games all the time? I hate the “service-ification” of everything, but I think it’s a near-monopoly that’s kind of hard to avoid.
There’s sites like GOG that give DRM-free versions of games, and I like GOG a lot, but it’s still fundamentally a proprietary service that could shut its doors down tomorrow. I know that I personally do not have all my GOG games backed up, and I am one of the rare people that has enough disk space to actually do that, so I doubt I am weird here.
Nope. Adding the "steam has to be running" check is an optional step the game developer performs before they upload their game to steam. The dev can go out of their way to wrap their .exe in the steam DRM.
If the dev does not do this, there is no steam DRM. lots of games dont use it, remember kenshi as an example.
There’s sites like GOG that give DRM-free versions of games, and I like GOG a lot, but it’s still fundamentally a proprietary service that could shut its doors down tomorrow. I know that I personally do not have all my GOG games backed up, and I am one of the rare people that has enough disk space to actually do that, so I doubt I am weird here.