[danShumway]

> Not to mention are you 100% sure those stores and your purchases will continue to exist longer than steam ect

This is more of people complaining about DRM and acting like giving Steam a monopoly over the market is a solution. If you're worried about a company going under and you losing your purchases, the solution to that problem is to not tie game access to an account.

People are looking at a clearly inferior system and saying, "it's OK, Valve will do such a good job that I won't notice the flaws."

You don't have a problem with too much store diversity, you have a problem with DRM and the constant need for you to have a good-standing Steam account and a computer running their client in order for you to access any of your games. But Steam is only a solution to your problem if the company never goes out of business, never bans you, never starts doing shady stuff, never gets overshadowed by competitor... those are not safe bets for you to make.

[katbyte]

well no, because let's say there is no DRM, and the store does go under, and then your computer explodes and you don't have the terrabyte of games you own backed up somewhere, your SOL at that point?

Like while i trust sony to a degree i don't trust nintendo so all my switch games are hardcopy. I trust steam more then i trust EA/epic and thats on top of the not wanting to deal with multiple stores/ect.

[danShumway]

Yes, if the store goes under, and you've never thought to buy a $50 terabyte drive to back up hundreds of dollars worth of games, and you never signed up for an online service like Backblaze that just uploads your entire computer including its program files, then you would have a problem. Presumably, at the point when the store went under and told you that it was no longer going to let you download your games, at that point you might have gone and backed up your games because you had advanced notice, but let's pretend you didn't.

Yes, if you ignored all of that you would have a problem, albeit in this case it would be a problem that was mostly your fault and not the fault of archaic US copyright laws. The point is that without DRM you at least have the option to be responsible and prevent this problem. With DRM, you don't have that option.

> I trust steam more then i trust EA/epic

:shrug: People trusted Kodak and Gamestop too. I'm not worried Steam is going to go under tomorrow, but if something happens where you start to get worried about Steam, tough. You can't do anything about that now. I hope you trust Steam because you don't have an option not to -- no matter what happens in the future or who retires or dies or takes over the company or how the market changes. Your game library is reliant on Steam being perpetually trustworthy for the rest of your life.

> and thats on top of the not wanting to deal with multiple stores/ect.

It's also important to note here that you wouldn't have to deal with multiple stores if you didn't have DRM. You could buy a game from Epic and use a separate client that you preferred to download it. The only reason you can't do that today is because the games are DRM-encumbered and Valve can't legally connect to Epic's servers with your credentials on your behalf and download and run those games for you without breaking the law.

This kind of 'adversarial operability' was commonplace in the computing world before it became legally tenuous for companies to offer those services. There is no reason other than copyright law and a misplaced fervor around the CFAA that Valve couldn't manage your Epic library for you.

> so all my switch games are hardcopy

Partially just a PSA here: there are good reasons to buy hardcopy games but if you haven't rooted your Switch and dumped those cartridges, then they're not actually backed up. You can have an extensive collection of 3DS games right now, but Nintendo doesn't sell a 3DS at this point. The Switch is going to be in an even worse position when it gets retired, because it's DRM-encumbered to the point that emulators won't work unless you dump files from your Switch that you own. You can't set up Yuzu (legally) unless you have a working Switch to get those files from, and Nintendo is definitely going to discontinue selling the Switch at some point.

This is one of the problems of DRM, and people's solution to this problem seems to be "well, I'll just pretend that this can never happen." In a DRM-free world, you can at least try to be responsible. You can take initiative to dump your saves so you don't lose hundreds of hours of Animal Crossing progress and Splatoon data when someone steals your Switch. In the current world you have to either root your console or just shrug your shoulders and try to remind yourself that nothing lasts forever.

This is also a problem that giving one console-maker a monopoly over the entire market would not solve.