"DRM-free" is a good catch-all title in my opinion. I'd bet some DRM-free games do use launchers (perhaps giving options to go to the web site, change settings, or whatever), and renaming it "launcher-free" or even "Steam-optional" would easily become a slippery slope to including games that simply don't use Steam as DRM ("this game doesn't have a launcher, it runs directly from Steam and works on a Steamless machine" "yeah, but it runs several phoning-home checks in the background when hitting various triggers, deleting your save games and closing if the requested server cannot be found"). Ordering in subgroups is a good idea though.

I think the list title is fine and branching into smaller sections would also be great, My best guess it's a matter of opinion how one views DRM-Free.

In my book DRM-Free means:

A game or software that I'm able to install on as many PC's as I wish (provided I'm the owner) and without the need of an internet connection. If a game requires GFWL and it's perfectly playable offline (minus the multiplayer of course), then that game is DRM-Free for me.


But Like I said, this is just a matter of opinion. I believe games that can be played on GFWL with an offline account should be included in the list.

cheers :-)

I can't for the life of me get Portal 1 to run without Steam, either by running the .exe or with the Command Prompt instructions. I get a Steam Start up failed/ Steam service is not running error message.

Could someone please help me out with this?

Ok thank you for looking into this. I remember trying a week or two ago and having no luck either.

Reason I wanted to do this was to move the game to a different HDD since Portal is forced to be installed on the same drive as Steam. I only want to use that drive for applications since it's a SSD and not much room on it but oh well.

You can use junctions for this issue. I use them all the time, it's perfect for SSDs :)
Junctions are like symbolic links, but a bit "harder". The usage is:

mklink /J "destination\of\planned\junction" "destination\of\folder"

Just move your folder where it should be and create a junction where the other programs usually would expect the moved folder. In my case i moved my home directory from my SSD to my backup drive to save space.

It's really weird that Portal didn't run for you outside of Steam... I just redownloaded the game onto a Windows 7 machine, and I was able to run it with the " -nosteam" trick without a single problem. I even clicked on Achievements at the main menu of the game, and it said "You must be logged into Steam to unlock or view Achievements," and the game itself played without any issues, so even the game knew Steam wasn't running.

I think I found the issue. I hadn't tried to play portal or HL2 in the client and only ran the .exe. Now Steam converts all game data into a new file format and downloads 2 GB missing (?!) files for portal only. I thought that SteamPipe was already applied to the HL2 games a while ago so I don't know what for this conversion is other than an improvement of SteamPipe.
I update my post, when the game is fully updated and I retried it.
Update:
It works fine now.

Oh, interesting... I'll have to keep this in mind for other games that I try in the future. That's a whole lot of missing data to have to update.

Thank you pedrovay and Kick-aha for looking into it. I followed the instructions for Portal on Win 7 from http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games and yeah no luck, is there somewhere else with better instructions? I'll look into the junction solution too, thanks.

Hi guys, there is other games are Officialy DRM free only downloading their paches from their official websites. these games originally are DRM free on their phiscal edition on in other stores, steam distribute the "SAME" versions only adding the steamworks DRM. I have tested played and replayed whiout DRM these games the method is:

Quake 2 (download the patch " 3.20" is compressed on an .exe(zip) extract whit win rar or 7zip then replace quake2.exe)
Quake 3 ( download the patch "1.32c" is compressed on a zip only replace the quake3.exe for its DRM free version)
Recettear ( download the patch v1.108 substitute recettear.exe for its DRM free version)
Chantelise ( download the patch v1.16 substitute chantelise.exe for its DRM free version)

In theory should be functional in other games other games like Unreal tournament goty edition and unreal gold... But I can't tested because I have DRM free from gog ;)

Note: chantelise & recettear sell two versions GamersGate(DRM free) and Steam (steamworks), the patches were relase for both at the same time. Only the steam is apply automatically but the GamersGate you need to download because is DRM free. In the case of quake 3 you will note has better performance whiout DRM (¬_¬)...

The 'You Dont Know Jack' classic games seem to work outside of Steam :D

Hmm, what error occurs or what is not exactly clear? pedrovay and I are nearly the only people writing stuff onto that site and I have not much experience in writing for wikis :P So if something's unclear, tell us or PM us.
If there is another site with better instructions? Could be. I created that list there because I didn't found a good one on the web - except this not updated and not so clear thread.

So these games are patched automatically by Steam but you can patch them manually to get rid of the DRM? Maybe I really have to create a "Works with Patch"-table.

All of them? There are like ~10 games and were my favorite quiz games :) I hope they are in english as good as the translated ones I own.

By that logic, I've tested Unreal and it works without Steam. Of course it would :P Once you overwrite the .exe, all bets are off :P

You're right^^ Why can't I think that wide? We could extent the list with games that are normally DRM-free and where at least one official patch was released by the developers, but that is a huge mass of games (and maybe a bit off from the original meaning of all this).