Maybe once in the past you thought about giving a friend a copy of a game you downloaded. You grabbed all the files, put them on a flash drive, and handed it over to them in hopes that all would go well. But that doesn’t work, unfortunately. The vast majority of games you download off of an online marketplace like Steam are protected with various forms of DRM (Digital Rights Management) tech that can detect unlicensed usage. Also, even if you could, that would constitute piracy, which is very illegal no matter its frequency in this day and age. New Blood Interactive’s games, however, may be an exception to this according to founder and CEO Dave Oshry:

Yeah tons of games on Steam are DRM free.

All of our games are.

You can just put the files on a USB or run them from your file explorer, desktop etc.

Steamworks is just a wrapper that enables the overlay for screenshots and video etc. https://t.co/uZKYd5mqGE

— Dave NewBlood (@DaveOshry) January 21, 2026

This is likely not an explicit call by Oshry to pirate his publisher’s titles, but it also wouldn’t be the first time someone under their banner has defended the practice. Hakita, The New Blood developer behind the famous boomer-shooter Ultrakill made an incredibly viral X post back in 2024 stating:

As creator of said game: You should support indies if you can, but culture shouldn’t exist only for those who can afford it. ULTRAKILL wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t had easy access to movies, music and games growing up.

If you don’t have money, you can support via word of mouth. https://t.co/iLTqy6s9vK

— Public Hakita Is a Good Idea (@HakitaDev) June 2, 2024

All games sold on the Steam Store are encased in the service’s default DRM, though the official documentation asserts that it doesn’t protect well against “a motivated attacker,” and encourages developers to use other DRM software along with it. Thus, Oshry’s claim about the weakness of the Steamworks wrapper DRM might be true, but it’s likely still not possible to simply copy and paste the game files with its presence. Valve’s general standpoint on pirating seems to amount to an ambivalence that can be attributed to the company’s customer-first business philosophy. In an interview with ABC news back in 2009, CEO Gabe Newell said that from his perspective, piracy is more of an issue of service than it is of greed or lack of money, and for that reason it’s not really a problem for Valve. It seems that for companies and publishers with a proven track record, the conversation surrounding intellectual property law is a bit more nuanced than others may make it out to be.