[gambiting]

You are correct of course. My point is that if Steam would disappear, a technological solution would appear to play your games. Just like even once every single PS1 on the planet turns into dust, we can still play PS1 games by other means. With stadia, this will never happen because you can't get a copy of a Stadia game I'm the first place.

[Wowfunhappy]

I just question how much that matters in practice. In both cases, you can theoretically replace the game you bought with a pirated copy.

All PS1 games have been archived, yes, because the method of ripping a PS1 game is consistent across every title, and the total number of games released was relatively small. That's not the case with PC games today, and I think it's virtually inevitable that a lot of indie games released exclusively on Steam will eventually be lost to time. As will many of the indie games released without DRM on itch.io—but at least any game you downloaded from itch.io will be playable forever.

You can argue cloud gaming is even worse. Maybe so, but at least it provides a lot of extra utility, since you can play on low-end devices. Steam provides automatic updates, that's kind of nice I guess, but not in the same class as running Assassin's Creed on your phone†. (Even then, I personally wouldn't pay full price for a game I can only run on someone else's servers, but I understand why someone else might.)

I don't like Steam.

† In theory. I've always found cloud gaming has too much latency for me. But in theory, if it worked perfectly—which perhaps it never will—the promise is nuts.