[MichaelCollins]

In the case of first party games owned by Valve, they may earnestly intend to do as they say, and consequently aren't lying when they say it. Nevertheless, such promises about what will happen when the company is departing are worth approximately jack shit. Whether it's Gabe (or his heirs) later deciding to sell the company or creditors carving up the company after it fails, there are many scenarios in which those earnest promises will fall through. Notch once promised to eventually open source Minecraft. Maybe he wasn't lying when he said it, he might have earnestly meant it. But that went straight out the window when Microsoft wrote him a big fat check.

In the case of third party games with DRM on Steam: Valve doesn't have a license to distribute those games without DRM, so they're effectively promising to become a pirate software distributor. They have the technical means to do this, but not the legal right. They're almost certainly self-deluding if not lying outright when they promise to do this. I lean towards flagrantly lying; they know they don't have a license to do what they're promising but they're promising it anyway. And if they're willing to lie about this, I think you should reevaluate their promises respecting first party games as well.

[Aeolun]

> they know they don't have a license to do what they're promising

Do they not? Did you read the terms for publishing a game on Steam?

I didn’t, but it’s within reason it contains a provision for just this eventuality.

[MichaelCollins]

Such a term would be poison to most game developers, particularly in the early days of Steam when it had nothing more than a handful of first party games. Before Steam achieved market dominance, how would they have convinced third party developers to accept it?

Unless somebody shows me that term in the contracts, I don't believe it exists. It doesn't make sense for it to exist; the only reason to think it does is because you like Gabe and don't think he would lie to you.

[prepend]

It seems reasonable for developers (as I’m not a developer) as Steam was just selling licenses.

It would be the equivalent of Walmart saying they would let people buy copies of games and run them forever.

So it makes sense that Steam would be able to make it so the games sold keep running without Steam existing. It seems pretty simple technically too as they would just update their client to no longer phone home to Steam.

[Aeolun]

> how would they have convinced third party developers to accept it?

Present it as a feature?

“In the event of the dissolution of Steam/Valve, we will endeavour to do everything reasonable to ensure that previously purchased licenses to your content keep working for subscribers in the absence of the Steam platform.”

Just because they try to keep it working doesn’t mean they have to make it DRM free (e.g. copyable between all computers without any checks).