wait, this includes ceg games?

I use the Windows Sandbox feature, included in the Pro version. It requires a from scratch setup of the Epic client at every run, but the upside of that is once exited, there are no vestiges of the Epic client on the base install. The game itself is installed to an external drive, so all that's left is the actual game folder.

I'd figure that would also get around any Steam CEG type shenanigans, but I wouldn't stake my life on it or anything.

Now the base install, I actually have a website logged in Epic account, but I don't really think that's out of the bounds of what is required. Or is it?

Some games do pop up a web browser asking for permission to do whatever, but other than usually dismissing it, I don't know if it already recognising my Epic web cookie also identifies me as having a 'valid' account.

It looks as if the user ID is used to encode the savegames (like it's common for PS4 savegames), so I guess you either used the same ID or found a decoder/encoder.
I just played it with launcher, that made building roads a lot easier :)

No, see this post for more info.

On Windows, EOS saves credentials to Windows Credentials if the game is run outside the launcher. It is documented here.

Ah, thanks Roze! That certainly explains it in more detail. I've updated the original post to recommend people test ideally on a 2nd PC (if they have one) or at least a 2nd Windows account (that's never run the Epic Game Launcher) just to be more sure of genuine 'portability' and against potential future surprises of a game not starting after a clean Windows reinstall.

Yeah, CEG is additional DRM on top of the Steam client itself. Thankfully, almost nobody uses it now; even Valve has patched it out of all of their own games that had it.

Oh, this is interesting. You can back up your Windows credentials using the Credentials Manager, and you can move it to any machine and restore the file completely offline. I've tested this with a few games that require Microsoft accounts on Steam, and they all transferred perfectly. I'm going to have to play with this.

In light of these new DRM findings, I checked Axiom Verge, Axiom Verge 2, and Death Stranding on a machine that's never had the Epic Store installed on it, and with the network connection completely cut. They all worked, so we know that those three are totally DRM-free.

nvm

Is Horizon Zero Dawn really drm free?
Pcgamingwiki can be wrong (I corrected a lot of things there) but I would like to be sure.
I want to avoid gog since the hitman fiasco and horizon zero dawn was on my wishlist (but of course no game should be necessary, if it use drm I'll just avoid to buy it both on gog and on epic).

Thank you

I'm not sure. There's a disparity between this list and PCGW, so until someone retests it I can't say for sure.

To everyone here, I'll be honest and say in context of the situation described in this post becoming a little more permanent, I'm struggling a bit to stay on top of maintaining this list. The last thing I want to do is leave inaccuracies in the list and mislead people into buying a DRM-Free game that isn't (especially if there's no refund guarantee on DRM grounds), but I also apologise for not having the time that I used to for testing things myself. I know we have at least one awesome person here who's an editor on PCGW and keeps it updated. I'm quite happy for that to be the definitive list as there is a way of filtering DRM-Free on Epic Games there that's easily bookmarkable.

Rather than abandon this list though, if someone else here has a Gmail account and wants me to add them as co-author (can be multiple people), I'm also more than happy to do that so they can directly edit this list and perhaps maintain it better than I can at the moment (either PM me here with your address (it will never be made public or be visible to anyone, or I think you can request editing access via the spreadsheet itself if you're signed in) and I'll add it to the Google Sheets permissions page for full editing / co-author capabilities). Sorry guys, I don't want to seem like I'm abandoning the list, but things have become unexpectedly busier than normal right now and family comes first.

PCGamingWiki used to show that Horizon was DRM-free, it's only recently that someone changed it. I wonder if a new update did something; I don't have it on Epic to test it, unfortunately.

the main problem is anyone can change info on pcgamingwiki.
Sometimes I find pillars of eternity like a non-drm free game on steam or epic, each time I try it and I see that's actually drm-free so I correct the information.
That's why I asked, if someone got it and try it out we can be sure it's actually drm-free or there was an update to add drm (for people that already own the game and made a backup it's not a problem).
I think that's strange since there is already another drm-free version.
If nobody can answer I'll try to contact the developer/editor

Well, I can confirm that the GOG version of HZD is DRM free :)

I'll avoid that version... I don't want to support gog with drm.