Steam with Disc Version

[Les]

Originally Posted by JAMF

For Dirt, GfWL was needed, or else progress isn't saved.

GFWL was included in GTA4 as well. With that, there were only some things that weren't saved. You could still do basic game saves and get through the game without GFWL, but you couldn't save the sorts of things that would have to be kept on the GFWL cloud service. (eg. you couldn't save a collection of stolen cars in a virtual garage in-game, only the car you were using at the time when you did a regular game save).

Steam also uses a cloud-type service, but I can't see why it would be essential, even for saving your progress through a campaign. If they've integrated Steam achievements and ranking up etc. you'd obviously need a Steam ID to have that data saved on the Steam cloud, but I can't see why it would be compulsory. And again, those Steamworks features are distinct from the match-making feature, which is the only Steamworks feature that's been confirmed as being part of the boxed version.