And you don’t need the official Steam client to download games. There’s tek-steamclient and steamctl, for example.

I don’t get what that has to do with DRM. For example, I need to have a package manager installed to install packages. Doesn’t mean the package manager is DRM.

How is that any more DRM than GOG requiring you to use their website to download games from them?

How? Steam games don’t necessarily have DRM, they can be the exact same files you download elsewhere. And the Steam client may be proprietary, but no mechanism prevents you from copying it around or using it, other than requiring login data, which stores like GOG also require?

It’s not about “someone else probably will”, it’s about “someone else already has”. No one is advocating for diffusion of responsibility.

My guess is that this is part of some kind of machine learning pipeline, where users label edge cases to help train the model. Since it operates on account data, match data, and logs (see CSteamGPT_GetTask_Response), an anti-cheat use case would make sense, but it’s hard to say for sure.

This looks like data exchanged between the Steam client and server, and doesn’t contain any logic on its own.

That’s because it’s a Protobuf file. Has nothing to do with prototypes.