Adam's Venture 1, 2 and 3

There seems to be some confusion of terms here. CEG is a very specific copy protection on very few Steam games that generates a custom executable (hence the name) that is encrypted and cryptographically signed with a key specific to your computer. It's applied to for example Portal 2, Deus Ex HR and some other modern games. (Telltale sign is that you get a "Preparing install" popup the first time you run the game)

What you are talking about here is the Steam Wrapper, that checks if Steam is running and the user owns a copy of the game at startup. While still DRM, it's a different one than CEG, and I think being specific what we're talking about here is important.

That's interesting. It let me run the game without activating a Stardock account, unlike other games such as Sins of a Solar Empire, which seemed to run without Steam but required a Stardock account before hand. Yeah, I just double checked, GC2 runs for me without creating an account for some reason, but other Stardock games do not.

Are you entirely sure this description is accurate? The reason I ask is that, I have over 400 Steam games, and literally every single one says "Preparing install" the first time it runs. Literally all of them. Also, Portal 2, when taken out of the Steam folder and executed does not give the "Preparing install" message, and actually loads the game -- it does however crash at one of the loading screens.

Sine Mora is actually quite good. I played it on the Xbox 360, but I would much rather have a PC copy.

I'm still going through my games and what not and trying a few work arounds to see if more of the games can be run without Steam. I noticed that Dungeon Siege 1 appears to be DRM free but is in the pastebin as not being so - can anyone else who has DS1 on Steam check and see if theirs runs without needing Steam?

I did some time agon, and found that DS2 works without Steam, but DS1 and 3 needed it running

Hmm alright, it should stay on the DRM list then. I wonder why it's working for me currently..

maybe I did something wrong, steam is temperamental. How did you do it?

I just clicked on the exe and it worked. I'm transferring the game to a usb drive right now and I'm gonna try it out on another computer that's never had Steam installed on it. I'll update this in a minute and let you know if that works.

Edit: Okay, I put the game folder on another computer and it did in fact work. It seems to be DRM free. Check yours again when you get some free time and see if it works. If yours still doesn't work, we can compare files in the folder and see if maybe all it takes is a small dll file or something to get it to run without Steam (but I have not altered my game folder so our files should be the same).

Also, Galactic Civilzations 1 Ultimate Edition is supposedly DRM Free, though I can't get mine to run on Win7 64bit.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2876006

The methods in that thread apparently work for some people, but did not for me.

The whole premise of this thread is flawed. Working without the Steam client does NOT mean a game is DRM free. It just means it doesn't use Steam as DRM, it could use GFWL or Securom or something else entirely.

I am glad you took the time to read the original post before jumping in.

"Note that games with any third party DRM are disqualified from this list, even if they do not actually use CEG (such as C&C4 or Batman:AA). "

By the way, Cargo Commander can be added to the bin which requires steam to be running

Your face is flawed.