http://www.desura.com/games/hard-reset

I see no information about neither the presence nor absence of any kind of DRM on that page. Are all Desura games DRM free?

Not all Desura games are necessarily DRM free, but if you look on a game that does require Steam

http://www.desura.com/games/zeno-clash

You'll see a warning that "This game requires Steam to run." I tested Hard Reset from Desura recently and it runs 100% Steam-free.

The quote function is your friend. Admittedly, it's sometimes your drunk, passive-aggressive friend, who will deliberately misunderstand what you are trying to tell him, but it's still your friend ;-)

this!

games BUILT with Steamworks are not the same as games enabled with Steam. the former is sort of like it uses Steamworks as part of it's engine.

and GFWL's ease of removal is probably more a byproduct of it being designed to be easily installed into any game released on the Xbox.

Yes, I think some games may have CD Keys, but none of them I've ran across need the client to run and all the ones I tried ran just fine when copied from machine to machine, as long as all the dependencies like .NET, Direct X, ect were updated.

Note with Hard Reset though that they never updated it to have the latest free content they put on the steam release. I asked there on the game's summary page but never got a response. Not sure if that was an oversight or what from the developers.

Ah. That's annoying site design in my book. If they only include the information sometimes, then you can never be sure if a game is actually DRM free, or it's just an oversight. I'd have put the information in the top box, along with platform, engine, developer, etc. Just make another line, "DRM", and put "none" if that's the case.

typically, me and Orc's conversations are the two of us quoting back and forth for multiple lines with no interrupting posts ... I was kinda trying to cut down on the number of Orc quotes, but it bit me in the ass.

Removing Steamworks is actually very easy, you just have to provide a "dummy" DLL instead of the Steamwork one (that's basically what most cracks do), but it's only easy as long as you "remove" stuff it becomes harder if you want to replace those "stuff" by something else.

In short it would be easy to take a game using Steam achievements, multiplayer features and cloud saves and make it an achievement-less, single player with local save game.

But it would be a lot harder if you actually wanted to re-add those features using a different service. (Unless the game has been thought to use multiple services from the beginning)

I imagine it depends a lot on how the software using the Steamworks API has been implemented. If the game expects a reply that makes sense from the DLL (say, a list of servers in a specific format), then it depends on the error handling that function call is wrapped in.

I think Steamworks was used for multiplayer only. The DRM free copies I got from Gamersgate and Amazon did not support multiplayer.

If you bought Velvet Assassin on a disc it required Steam for installation. It also did not appear on any other digital store at launch, to my knowledge. Later it was released on other sites without Steam, so really that seems like the perfect example.

The horrible game Rogue Warrior on disc allowed you to CHOOSE between a Steamworks multiplayer enabled install or a DRM free singleplayer only install. That was pretty cool.

Sending back reply that make sense is the job of the dummy DLL, (e.g. returning success to achievements registration request, returning an empty list for server, etc...), IRC Valve even provides one to developers, but even without it, it's not something very hard to do.

Of course like I said it's only valid if the game can work with the Steam features disabled.