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22 days agoLess games actually use Steam’s DRM than people think. Even the ones that require Steam to run often just use their API for stuff like multiplayer functionality or displaying leaderboards.
There’s an open source library that you can sub in to emulate the API and run the games on LAN without Steam. I believe there’s no decryption involved so it should be 100% legal, just like how Proton reimplements Windows APIs.
These are good points, but modern PvP games still support custom matches and going from there to self-hosted servers isn’t really much of a leap.
In fact, I believe Valve’s new game Deadlock does let you run your own dedicated servers.