[hbn]

At least I can rest assured that pretty much anything that's been put on Steam has a cracked version out there, and if one day Valve disappears and I lose my entire library, I'll just go pirate whatever I want to play again.

Good luck doing that for a game that consumers were only ever sent frames of. If/when there's a streaming-exclusive game, it'll be conclusively lost to time when the company stops letting people play it.

[endominus]

Versions of this have been going on for years now. MMOs and multiplayer-focused titles die all the time, often with no way for players to access any of the content in those games. There might be a few exceptions where an extremely devoted fanbase reverse engineers the server code and runs instances of it, but that is hardly the rule.

This is the tragedy of game development. I heard the other day that copies of Anthem are selling for a penny at GameStop. When EA abandons that game (any day now), all of the work of those programmers, artists, and everyone else will basically be lost. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, gone.