It depends on the game and how they handle steam, if they see steam as a requirement then the game is choosing to use steam as a very rudimentary (and easily bypassed) DRM. But this is more about lazy development than DRM, essentially they're not expecting the steam APIs to fail, which is ridiculous considering they have non-steam versions, so a simple if statement would solve this issue. Also this paints those games in a very bad light to me, because if they're doing that with some API call on steam they might be doing it with another and now the game needs to be online always.

There are plenty of multiplayer games that don't require steam, iirc all of the paradox games you can just copy the folder to a different computer without steam and run the binaries.

And while not ideal, someone else pointed in another comment that there's an open source implementation of the steam API, so worst case scenario you just replace the library in your backup and you're done.

[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Can you not connect by IP in Terraria? I had though I had multiplayer running without even starting steam at one point...

[–] RandomVideos@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Because steam multiplayer is implemented into the game, you cant open the app if steam is not installed

[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 1 points 21 hours ago

I thought I had it running without starting steam before... That was pre-1.4 and the windows version though, so things may have changed. I know there used to be a wrapper that would start the game outside of steam, but that was ages ago.

I don't think this is because of multiplayer though, as you can just not use steam services for multiplayer and connect directly to IPs. In my case trying to run without steam started causing crashes with windows forms, so steam linux runtime is probably being used for at least a few things.

Copying terraria to a windows VM (which was far more work that it needed to be) results in something similar, with a TypeInitializationException, so Steam is needed for what looks to be some social API, maybe for grabbing social links? It's quite possible that there are more things, but I don't think Terraria requires steam multiplayer services, especially as the GOG version runs without steam.

I don't think that counts as DRM, but the end effect is similar: steam needs to be running. If steam ever dies, I'm certain a simple wrapper will be made to run Terraria and probably many similarly integrated games, but it is not ideal.