It does, though the problem with such comparisons is people end up including every other unrelated feature they like about Steam as a whole (which has nothing to do with DRM) - vs the specific issue of DRM. Eg, an Internet store, digital downloads, a gaming discussion forum, community support, updates / patches, Indie devs, big sale discounts, big picture mode, cloud saves, achievements, etc, are unrelated features that can and do exist without even basic SteamWorks DRM (if a developer requests it), let alone CEG or Denuvo tacked on.
The best advice I can give here is to
check out this list. It's a non-exhaustive community made list of games sold on Steam that don't include SteamWorks / CEG DRM and technically run without the Steam client even installed. Many older games can't have SteamWorks in, eg, it's impossible to link Windows Steam libraries to 16-bit DOS .exe's, so a lot of DOS / ScummVM games on Steam lack DRM). Any games on that list, you can basically download via the Steam client once and then zip up their folder into a zip file, and they should then be portable for future plays / reinstalls (like a GOG installer) even on different hardware without the need for the Steam client. I've tested it for several on that list, eg, Portal, Half Life 1-2, The Cave, Styx, some DOS titles, etc, and it does indeed work. So if you grab any needs XP titles now before 1st Jan 2019, zip them up then back them up, that might help minimise some damage. Likewise, anything that runs via source-ports are often immune. ScummVM, GZDoom, QuakeSpasm, etc, that kind of stuff.
Unfortunately, this is more urban myth that people want to believe than is actually truth. It goes back to one single post by Gabe Newell who said:
"If you right click on a game in Steam, you'll see that you can back up the files yourself. Unless there was some situation I don't understand, we would presumably disable authentication before any event that would preclude the authentication servers from being available. We've tested disabling authentication and it works".
http://web.archive.org/web/20100108...0/forums/showpost.php?p=10642189&postcount=28
^ First up, that's an unofficial forum post by Gabe theorizing, and is by no means the same technical / legal / functional guarantee as say GOG's offline installers (for which it's written into their user agreement you have a legal right to continue to use post-GOG). Secondly,
it only applies to stuff you've already downloaded and have installed / backed up locally. ie, if you have a big 4TB HDD with all your Steam games on simultaneously installed, you're good to go (as long as you back them all up). But if you only install a couple of games at once out of say 500 Steam games whilst the other 498 exist only on the cloud, then they can maybe change the client to allow those 2 you have installed to work,
but if they ever shut down the authentication servers they'll obviously be shutting down the download servers at the same time and you won't be able to download the uninstalled 498 cloud games anyway, ie, the lack of GOG / Humble style offline installers will leave many people without most of their games anyway. And even then, any fix (which they may not even have a legal right to do so for non-Valve games nor can remove 3rd party Denuvo, etc) will almost certainly involve some client level workaround, eg, Steam Client patched to return an auto-check without even checking. Problem is, 5-10 years down the line, you may hit the same wall as you are now with XP if a then 10 year old Steam Client stops working due to Microsoft being Microsoft (but the games themselves run fine), and you're basically screwed if Valve isn't around to update it.
Of course, Steam are unlikely to go bankrupt financially. OTOH, they are a private business not beholden to shareholders and if Uncle Gabe ever got bored / cynical or just dropped dead in his old age and less than optimal weight and whoever in his family inherited it wanted nothing to do with gaming and just pulled the plug, poof, the whole lot would be gone overnight with zero legal recourse to anything (and with zero offline installers, no ability to continue to install the games you don't already have installed post download server shutdown). That's why they call it the Steam
Subscriber Agreement - just like Netflix, everything you "own" ceases when the server's go down and your "subscription" ends regardless of that
"We guarantee you'll be able to play everything" urban myth that literally no-one at Valve (including Gabe) has actually ever said.
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