[dsnr]

What happens with your Steam Machine if Steam decides to pull the plug for whatever reason?

[Rhedox]

Valve has said in the past that they'd patch out steamworks DRM and allow you to download stuff in advance in case the company dies.

Yes, that's a pretty shallow promise not a guarantee. If they don't, there's always piracy to get access to the games you already legally purchased.

[siquick]

If the company is going bust then the last thing their shareholders are going to do is let them pay devs to do stuff that doesn’t make money.

[fooker]

You can find Steam cracks for most popular games on torrent sites right now.

So, realistically someone would make a tool to do this automatically (not done now because API changes quickly, which is not an issue at EOL).

The larger issue is multiplayer servers run by Valve. Some games allow you to run a server and connect to arbitrary servers, most do not. Those are going to be somewhat unplayable without explicit action from Valve.

[cable2600]

I used to pirate games until Steam made them affordable and solved the lost CD/DVD issues. So I bought some games for my friends to make up for my past piracy of those games.

[anang]

Valve is privately owned, which I think makes this promise a little more believable (or at least more feasible).

[moistbar]

That would be a substantial problem for a publicly traded company, yes.

[tweetle_beetle]

Although multiplayer games are pretty much all wrapped up in proprietary systems like Steam, there are significant DRM-free content libraries on GOG and itch.io.

[cable2600]

I'll go to a different service. I doubt Valve will pull the plug on Steam they are doing very well.