Often with good reason, the Steam API provides some very nice APIs (cloud saves, mods, controller input mapping, multiplayer sessions, etc.) that can be assumed to be available if you're only selling your game through Steam anyway.

You can use common Steam piracy tools to work around this problem, though. All you need to do is build (or download, if you've for faith in your antivirus software) a few DLLs and drop them into the game folder: https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator

> You can use common Steam piracy tools to work around this problem, though.

I have actually tried to use these on purchased games. They sometimes work, they sometimes obviously don't work, and they sometimes appear to work and then cause weird bugs far into the game.

Somehow when I buy games on GOG I never have to worry about this.