It looks like they miss out on the Steamworks features "(e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.)" if they opt not to use their DRM, so I can understand why the vast majority of devs would want to use it.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

You can actually pick and choose which parts of the steamworks api to implement, so you can have trading cards, multiplayer etc without the drm side.

from memory, i think you do need to use the drm to use family sharing, we had issue with that when we chose not to use the drm, but everything else we could implement fine without it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

Ah I didn't realise that, thanks. The overview page made it seem like the DRM was required for any of that to work.