Steam’s DRM is not mandatory to release a game on Steam. Its there in fact to provide a necessary lesser evil than to encourage every developer/publisher to produce their own. They still unfortunately do, which Steam at least warns customers about, but them providing their own minimal DRM is a good thing, given the context.
Valve does not discourage third party DRM at all. I wanna say there are dev FAQs where they actively encourage it, in fact. Let me look for the quote…
…Here we go. They straight up point out that their DRM isn’t enough and recommend making GaaS games and leaning into their platform features to make pirate copies and non-DRMd copies not work or work worse. And they support third party DRM explicitly.
I don’t see how this is consistent with discouraging DRM use. People project a lot on the go-to defenses for this particular argument, and it’s weird.
The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
We suggest enhancing the value of legitimate copies of your game by using Steamworks features which won’t work on non-legitimate copies (e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.).
The Steam wrapper can and should be used in combination with other DRM solutions. To do so, apply the Steam wrapper in compatibility mode first before applying any other DRM. Apply it first so that it does not interfere with the DRM solution. Compatibility mode will disable DRM capabilities of the wrapper.
Steam’s DRM is not mandatory to release a game on Steam. Its there in fact to provide a necessary lesser evil than to encourage every developer/publisher to produce their own. They still unfortunately do, which Steam at least warns customers about, but them providing their own minimal DRM is a good thing, given the context.
(That said, I still respect gog)
Valve does not discourage third party DRM at all. I wanna say there are dev FAQs where they actively encourage it, in fact. Let me look for the quote…
…Here we go. They straight up point out that their DRM isn’t enough and recommend making GaaS games and leaning into their platform features to make pirate copies and non-DRMd copies not work or work worse. And they support third party DRM explicitly.
I don’t see how this is consistent with discouraging DRM use. People project a lot on the go-to defenses for this particular argument, and it’s weird.