Well as far as I'm concerned, that's a nice bit sleuthing, even if you consider it just trying things out of the blue.

Unfortunately, this trick doesn't work with Arkham City. It's programmed differently than Asylum, it seems, and it just won't work. The weird thing is that it TRIES to, and it even makes the non-Steam config and save folder in Documents\WB Games.
Thanks, I appreciate it. :D Ah, okay, I see what you're saying. I don't think the installer did any of that, though; when I backed the game up to an external drive and played it on a different, non-Steam computer, I hadn't even run the game from Steam a single time before copying the whole thing, so it didn't even have a chance to do Steam's annoying first-run setup.

The thing is that if your computer has already all dependencies installed it will work just fine. Those dependencies might come from a different game or be installed by Windows by default (such as DirectX) or you might have installed them already for another purpose.

When I compiled Arx Libertatis (source port for Arx Fatalis) on OS X i had to install all sorts of libraries to compile the game and it worked perfectly. However, after I wiped my hard drive I ran the app and it didn't work because I hadn't installed the dependencies yet. The same would have happened if I passed the app to someone else's computer. The right thing would have been to bundle the libraries together with the app itself.

So, nothing can be done to the main .exe to run without Steam? You need to create a shortcut?

You could create a batch script and run that.

Nice discovery! ^_^

No, not really.

Create a file called RunBatman.bat. Add this to it.

ShippingPC-BmGame.exe -nosteam

Save it, make sure its in the same directory as the game executable. Simples.

OH, weird, okay. I see where you're coming from, and I can understand that, then.

Okay, so, I have an update, and it's not exactly good news.

I just started playing through Arkham Asylum GOTY, and it looks like the Challenge Mode maps crash the game if you're not playing through Steam. The main game hasn't given me any problems yet, though, which is good. I'll keep updating if I notice anything else weird.

Arkham Asylum was originally a GFWL game, wasn't it? I wonder if any of the other GFWL games that were patched to Steamworks work like this.

Bioshock was. The Batman games were the second major one I know of to have it removed. I hear Capcom is looking into migrating their dependent content, but last I heard they didn't really have an action plan beyond saying they would. There definitely should be a few more, but how many compared to the full list of GFLW games we will just have to wait and see on.

I also think Dark Souls was going to be at some point, but I only heard that around the rumor mill and nothing concrete.

There are quite a few that are going to Steamworks, but so far, Arkham Asylum is unfortunately the only one that works with the -nosteam trick to get it to play DRM-free. I'm wondering if there are other commands that can be tried.

Except that the installers for said frameworks are in the game folder. At least all Steam games I've tried, which admittedly aren't very many, did include all requirements that way.

FOR EVERYONE WHO HAS BEEN FOLLOWING THIS THREAD, PLEASE READ!

Please note, there will be a spoiler in this post.

I found that Arkham Asylum GOTY sometimes crashes if you run it without Steam when you attempt to leave the room you end up in after the first encounter with Scarecrow. Multiple times, I got the same error message I'd see if I try to play the Challenge maps outside of Steam.

The weird thing about this bug? It's seemingly COMPLETELY RANDOM.

At first, I thought I'd be able to bypass the problem by simply having Steam running and sitting at the login screen (that's actually done stuff with other games in the past), but instead, I moved the entire Arkham Asylum GOTY installation folder to my Desktop instead of its normal place within Steam's folder, and it seemed to work 50% of the time and crash 50% of the time. I have no idea what's going on, and I honestly don't even know if moving the entire game actually did anything at all.

Someone hold me, I'm scared.