Way to move the goalposts buddy. The post said "without starting steam" so I replied with how you can do that, not how you can run games without the steam client installed at all. That said if you don't like steam just don't use it. I don't see what would be the point in installing steam, buying games using it and then trying to play them with it uninstalled. At that point you would already have paid valve and literally only be hurting yourself.

Most steam games use the steam api, and do something along the lines of: If steam not running, show error popup.

Often with good reason, the Steam API provides some very nice APIs (cloud saves, mods, controller input mapping, multiplayer sessions, etc.) that can be assumed to be available if you're only selling your game through Steam anyway.

You can use common Steam piracy tools to work around this problem, though. All you need to do is build (or download, if you've for faith in your antivirus software) a few DLLs and drop them into the game folder: https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator

> You can use common Steam piracy tools to work around this problem, though.

I have actually tried to use these on purchased games. They sometimes work, they sometimes obviously don't work, and they sometimes appear to work initially but then cause weird bugs deep into the game.

Somehow when I buy games on GOG I never have to worry about this.

The problem is that most games are only available on Steam.