Personally I tried to avoid Steam as the plague, I uses it at little as possible and uninstall it as soon as I finished playing a Steamwork using games.

I don't really care about Steam sales either as the issue I have is more finding games to buy (given that I try to limit to only 3-4 online activation using games per year) rather than money to buy them.

I guess Valve once promised or implied something like that, but still I have a few reservations with that theory:

1. Why isn't that promise mentioned in Steam EULA? In fact, why does the EULA state pretty much the opposite, ie. Valve has no obligation to anyone in case they are shut down?

2. I have hard time believing it is only up to Valve to decide whether they can release all the games of THQ, Ubisoft, EA, etc. etc. etc. without DRM to their users, whenever they feel so (like before the closure). The publishers still own the rights to those games even though Steam is distributing them, and they have hardly agreed on anything like that when they signed with Steam.

3. If there was a mere "switch" to make all Steam games DRM-free, then pirates would have certainly found that trapdoor already, years ago. It is a mere red herring, I don't believe Valve would have made their DRM system that vulnerable. It is obvious they would have to re-release each of the 1100 or so titles separately DRM-free, a separate crack for each game, if they wanted to release them Steam/DRM-free to their customers.

4. Quite frankly, when a company is near to closure and its technical experts have fled the sinking ship to other companies, creating and releasing cracks to thousands of games is probably lowest on the dying company's, or what's left of it, priority list., even if that pisses off some EX-customers.

It is fine to believe that Steam will be around "forever" or that they will never change the way you can access your games (like changing the service to a streaming game service), but frankly I do not believe one second they would release all their games Steam-free if the unthinkable (closure ot something similar) happened. Maybe their own Valve games, maybe, but that's all.

At first I did not cared much about steam when I heard about it. I just cancelled my plan to buy HL2 since I had no internet at that time and mostly forgot about that. It was that silly online platform wich required unnecessary annoyance to play single player games. Steam users got their stuff there and where happy I got my stuff in the store and was happy.

Would love to say thats it, live and let live and all that. Thing is these <insert unfriendly word of choice> at some point started to made themself a requirement on cool retail games I would like to play and otherwise would have bought. At that point my inner caveman wanted to pick up a big club and beat the crap out of anything steam related. But then again, I saved money on games and invited friends to a restaurant instead.

I don't get my hopes up much to see a at-the-moment steamworks (or otherwise online DRM) infected gameof those I would have bought anytime soon on gog even with their course set to add also new games. But if I do I'm glad I had been stubborn enough to resist and gladly buy them here.

215 Steam games and another sale just started - I'm still on the fence here ;)

Intellectually I can see the arguments against Steam (or any other similar service) - but none of those "issues" have ever affected me personally and add in the convenience and the sales and I can't resist. Sorry, *shrug*.

Oh, gotta go - my latest game has just about finished downloading ...

Well, I use it. Don't really care for it that much, but what can you do?

I usually do not buy games digitally on Steam (unless they're ridiculously cheap), and I'm gonna keep it that way as long as I possibly can.

Maybe, but then the buyer could be something like e.g. OnLive, transferring "your" games to their own system that may or may not be suitable for your needs. After all, you don't really own anything, but as a gesture of good will the new owner may grant you access to the same games in their system. Hopefully you are fine with their gesture.

There would also need to be a reason why someone would want to buy a _dying_ digital distributor. The userbase, which has already mostly migrated to other services for their new games? The few Valve games? It is not like Sierra or Westwood online components were kept up by their new owners that long either. There has to be some profit involved before the old service is kept up by someone else.

I plan on making backups of all my Steam games at some point in the future. If things go awry (and I don't think they will, but never say never) and Steam closes, someone will create an application that will allow backed-up games to be re-installed again.

29 games on Steam, 17 of which are Valve games or mods to them (Orange Box, registered Half-Life retail key, and Portal). Two other "AAA" titles (Mirror's Edge and Fallout: New Vegas), a pack of four classic point-and-click adventures (Loom, The Dig, and two Indiana Jones games), and a few indie titles.

I don't quite have ten times as many on GOG (218), but it should be pretty clear which service I prefer.

Peoples are so obsessed about the whole "Steam going down" and how it will "never" happens that they totally forget the other thing, Valve/Steam whoever can change the EULA and the conditions at which you can or can not access "your" games at any time without you being able to do anything about it except having your account cancelled.

If tomorrow Valve decide that you can only play a game for six month before you have to pay for it again (or that you have to play a monthly subscription), they can, if they decide that the games you have already bought shouldn't be played in the country you live in, they can remove them, etc... the EULA is basically a blank check, you gave them your money in exchange for a service left completely at their good will.

So, if Steam knows there's an update, you isn't allowed to play your/their game? Even if said update renders savegames useless - or do they differentiate between updates? While a patch/upgrade is supposed to be an improvement, there's no guarantee - every single change has the potential to mess up something else.

Of course, it makes kind of sense if they don't sell games but only access to games - you can bitch about the arcade hall having updated your favourite game making it a bit harder, but there's nothing you can do about it as you don't own it.

Personally, I prefer having a bit more say in the matter if I've purchased a game, so I don't think I'll ever "buy" (rent?) anything from Steam. Unless their offer somehow was better than all the other alternatives out there.

This.
Is why I consider it a rental service.


"but why would gabe ever..."

Well maybe one day the founders prefer to just cash in and cruise in the bahamas with a huge luxury yacht?

Maybe a merger with EA (and they'd just move the users & accounts into Origin)?

Maybe the new leadership would just add some "maintenance fee" or whatever, gotta reach that 10% yearly growth you know.

Stuff could happen!
A bunch of big publishers have gone out of business (or have been bought).

But as Portal 2 was only 10 eurobucks today, I went for it... :/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJmrRpPWj4M

I honestly don't mind Steam. I dislike that you have to run most games through it and it only, and I dislike the fact that you need to have an internet connection to play the games you have installed. But barring an unforeseen collapse or Valve suddenly pulling some sort of ridiculous move with the EULA, I don't see any particular reason to hate it passionately.

That being said, I much prefer buying games on GOG.

Your examples aren't really the same. There isn't any profit to be made by maintaining the Sierra/Westwood online services, they were net losses to maintain since those services did not actually generate profit. Steam is essentially an online store with a user base that has goods tied to that store. The idea of buying a company to 'buy its customers' is something that businesses do all the time.

You are describing a fairly unusual circumstance which would be a critical implosion of Steam that would drive users away. Considering users have several hundreds of dollars in the Steam ecosystem, most users that have large libraries won't want to migrate away unless they absolutely have to. And again this would assume that Steam just sits back while its business implodes. I think that would only really happen if PC gaming became even more marginalized that it is now. And that certainly does not appear to be given the number of online PC gaming stores that are available. Despite Steam being the dominant player in the market, other stores do not seem to have trouble selling games and staying in business. Thus you'd have to see a PC gaming implosion a kin to the Atari crash of the 80s.

Since Steam sells software and the margins on software are huge (ask anyone in sales that sells software) as long as you have customers buying PC games Steam should as an entity continue to operate.

Yep you hit the nail on the head.