Can you play a game before Stream "Unlocks" it?

[Gooch Guardian 69]

Just before a game's release on Steam, on it's store page it'll say "This game will unlock in approximately **days/hours".

I know if you pre-order the digital copy of a Steam game, you can pre-load the game before release/"unlock".

But what happens if you pre-order and/or buy a physical/hard copy of the game which you can pick up before Steam's release/unlock, install it on a pc via disc and, input the key code into Steam and you try to play off the disc? Will you still have to wait until the game "unlocks" on Steam?

ONLY out of curiosity. If that doesn't work, is there some sort of "loop-hole" or "exploit", I guess, where you can go in "offline mode" and play the game once installed?

I know that the games are protected by DRM. But if you disconnect the internet after install, how will the game know it's not allowed to "unlock" after a certain period of time?

[Dendrobates Tinctorius]

The preload content is encrypted and is only decrypted after the game is released. Nowadays discs often don't come with the full game so you'd have to download content anyway.

[cinedine]

You can't. The data is encrypted. The "loop hole" would be getting a pre-release version of the game.

[Wolfpig]

Originally posted by The Cod Father:

I know that the games are protected by DRM. But if you disconnect the internet after install, how will the game know it's not allowed to "unlock" after a certain period of time?

That ist easy....it wont unlock unless you connect to the internet again so that steam can check if the game got unlocked or not.
Games usually do not have a build in counter which checks if it should unlock or not, as that information is "send" online trough the steam client...or better said, if the game is not yet fully released and you go offline and stay so, the game will never unlock even if it is time.

[Satoru]

The game is encrypted on your hard drive with a unique key tied to you SteamID

You can do literally nothing with it other than ponder the answers to the universe

The only way to unlock the content is to get the decryption key. That key i sonly available through Steam, and is 100% unique to your account. There is no way to decrypt the content except to brute force it, which will likely take longer than the age of the universe to actually find the correct key

[Zefar]

Even IF there was a way to do this, asking for help here on how to do is out of question.