Which Hitman?

does he mean the free demo that you can download here?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/236870/HITMAN/

The latest one, which should just be called "HITMAN".

I downloaded the Demo for the latest Hitman and it seems that it does indeed require Steam. When I renamed Steam.exe to Stea.exe and try to start the launcher it says "Failed to initialize Steam" and closed. Also, running the HITMAN.exe directly seems to give me an error of some missing .dll file.

In other news, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory only works when logged into Steam. Starting the .exe with the renamed Steam churns out an application load error. However, the multiplayer works fine, as stated by the Wiki.

I have also tested Black Mesa. It refuses to even start without Steam already running, crashing instantly without even a login prompt from Steam. I also tried putting in the text file suggested by Marko, into the game's directory. I have one more trick up my sleeve regarding that and will report back shortly to edit this post. However, one must note that this game is still in early access.

Edited to add Black Mesa.

Are the above comments about "portable programs" and copying & pasting these games supposed to mean that the user can make backup copies that will never require Steam to be used again in order to install the same game for the second, third, fourth, fifth time, etc?

Or is that not what those comments mean? (In which case, if the second, third, fourth, fifth installations do require Steam to run again, then what is the point of copy & pasting the game elsewhere?)

If the comments do mean that Steam only ever needs to be run once in order to access unlimited installations anywhere, then how does one copy & paste the registry keys that the game requires to run?

Learn Japanese To Survive! Hiragana Battle is a cute little RPG Maker game that works without Steam.

You can buy games on steam nd then you can play them without launching steam.Is it possible?

Shadows of Adam (SNES style RPG) works fine without Steam. Tested it on Windows 7 64-bit. I only played the beginning of it but people say that it is inspired by SNES era JRPGs.

1) Almost all of those games don't even require a registry key and it's easy to test this as well (simply rename the regkeys created manually or by deinstalling the game which cou backuped before and see if the game still is running - you might also simply copy the game to a different PC to be absolutely sure).
2) If a game SHOULD need a regkey you will always be able to export them and add those to the backup files.
That is the whole purpose of this thread, yes. But you still will have to launch steam to downlosd the game for the first time. Also keep in mind that in some rare cases the list has an antry for an older version of the game and because of updates on steam the actual game cannot be played without steam. As I said those are pretty rare in my experience.

Woo, we have a couple more to add! I'll be doing that tonight. Thanks again, everyone!

What you assumed I was saying is correct: The games on this list require Steam only to download them once each, and they can all then just be backed up without Steam ever being necessary again. You can just go to where they are installed (the steamapps\common folder, by default) and put them on a flash drive, an external hard drive, a disc, etc., and they'll work on any machine; in this case, Steam is used as a means of acquiring the files once, and nothing more. I have never come across a single DRM-free Steam game that has required any sort of registry entries, except for maybe any that the games themselves make when they're run. Everything that's absolutely required to run the games is downloaded along with the games themselves, in separate folders in the games' download locations (meaning that if you just copy/paste the games to a different machine, you'll automatically bring along everything that's required to play the games, like DirectX setup files and things like that).

Okay, we're updated again!

I assume this was tested on Windows, correct?

I create a batch-file, with a menu to rename "Steam.exe" and back.

The batch file renames Steam.exe to Steam2.exe

So you can start up your drm free games, but the game can't start Steam. Because the file can't be found.

So you don't have to rename it manually.

I use the default installation directory of Steam, but you can edit the file to change it in yours.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7DNpHBjUW0_M3hVcTc0MkhhNE0/view?usp=sharing

It's beta. But on my computer everything work fine.

Start it up with administrator rights

Seems SimplePlanes work without steam

Tested on Wine (in a prefix without steam installed)

I can confirm that Tadpole Treble is DRM-free if you add a steam_appid.txt file.