Wait, for real? I'm so sorry, didn't knw about this, especially since people resurrected this thread in the first place.

Now that I have a better picture, the inclusion of galaxy.dll and related files makes a sense. Problem is that it seems to break compatibility with games on older OS...
Uh, CEG has been put down for quite a few years now, only old games and valve ones still use it.

Just recently 2k/gearbox removed CEG from their bordelrands games on steam (I know because I've decided to buy the bundle after reading this).

Totally off topic, but is borderlands 1,2,3 all drm free on steam now then?

I meant if they had to fix/remove it WHILE in business(also as I said, if they didn't do it before that ever happened i'm sure someone else would) they likely would.

Also I have more faith GOG would do so than steam, fwiw.

3 is out of the question: since epic has no drm by per se (contrary to steam, which features steamworks, a set of tools along an optional drm, but since greedy corporations are always greedy corporations, so almost all games come bundled with it on steam) 2k had the "great" idea of ruining the game with denuvo (more on this at the bottom of this post). Now while I can't talk about 1, I can say for certain that for 2 and the pre-sequel, while they had CEG removed, they still rely on steamworks, so the games still require steam in order to run (to put it short, they removed one layer of drm, which imho was trash and I'm glad about that, but we are far from a drm-free release).

As far the custom build goes: from what I could investigate (I don't claim anything, these are just things I could figure out, so this is just my theory), usually denuvo on steam games should be wrapped on the steamapi(x64).dll, so basically a drm on drm (I don't care about the PR BS "it's anti-tamper!") in order to work (aka being anti-consumer); now, since egs has no in house drm, they made a custom build which I believe is completely wrapped to borderlands 3 exe. The funny thing is that in the first week after release, denuvo was NOT working correctly, as people found out that they could refund the game and still play it (that's because egs has no api and manifest files imho), but I'm pretty sure that they ended up "fixing" this since then.

But hey, this is coming from the same company which removed the original bulletstorm from steam, added the full clip edition and bundled it with denuvo, and I'm pretty sure it was because they "feared" that they could "lose" money from people who would crack the older version instead of buying the new one (yeah, sure, as if adding it doesn't make us angry enough).