Posted April 06, 2023
The answer is no. And it's the horrible consequence of DLC.
We used to have expansions. Which required the base game, but were sold separately.
DLCs were panned across the board when they started, for offering a questionable worth of content for small but significant amouts of money.
And then DLCs were integrated into platforms like Steam.
And then Steam's functionality of providing evidence of ownership made expansions "easier".
I am not qualified to describe the entire history/transition, but nowadays DLC weakly implies rights restriction. Whether that is DRM or not depends on the extent and marketing.
After owning Rimworld on GOG, and buying the DLC: Biotech, I refunded Biotech here and subsequently bought (Rimworld+Royalty+Biotech) on Steam because due to regional pricing, those three were cheaper than (Royalty and Biotech) on GOG.
Ideally I would have just bought Royalty on Steam, and installed it to my existing stack. But it doesn't work because you need the base game to buy DLC anywhere.
We used to have expansions. Which required the base game, but were sold separately.
DLCs were panned across the board when they started, for offering a questionable worth of content for small but significant amouts of money.
And then DLCs were integrated into platforms like Steam.
And then Steam's functionality of providing evidence of ownership made expansions "easier".
I am not qualified to describe the entire history/transition, but nowadays DLC weakly implies rights restriction. Whether that is DRM or not depends on the extent and marketing.
After owning Rimworld on GOG, and buying the DLC: Biotech, I refunded Biotech here and subsequently bought (Rimworld+Royalty+Biotech) on Steam because due to regional pricing, those three were cheaper than (Royalty and Biotech) on GOG.
Ideally I would have just bought Royalty on Steam, and installed it to my existing stack. But it doesn't work because you need the base game to buy DLC anywhere.