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Has the barrier for non technical consumer gone down? Back in the 90s when some game didn't work because of some weird issue (we had two CD drives and it would refuse to detect the CD in either drive) my parents had no problem downloading a pirated one that didn't need a CD.

You wouldn't have to figure it out yourself. They didn't need a hex editor. But they did understand "download this file, go to this part of Program Files, move the downloaded file here and agree to overwrite". You'll find similar guides online. They already exist, because it's the same as if you're trying to pirate a Steam game!

People will do anything for the dancing bunnies. Both good and bad.

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No my point here is that you have to download and install Steam before you can download and install any games. Now if I’m non-technical why would I want to make the extra effort to go Drm free if I have to use Steam anyways?

I know technical people can do it, but I do not believe this is a path for the non-technical user.

The proposed steps are:

- buy game on steam marketplace (no client) - download and install games (client required) - uninstall steam client and paste in fake dll file

But now I want more games… so rinse and repeat? This is a lot of work.

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No you don't, you just have to plug in this USB drive and copy the files to your hard drive.
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The premise of this hypothetical is Steam's servers going away. Ping me about this if and when it ever happens and I'll write you a tool where you can select the steamapi.dll you downloaded and have it copied to where your games need it. There's a fair chance you might not even need to because someone else will have made it before me.
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