this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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That is absolutely not correct.
Steam policy is if valve shuts it down, they'll give you enough time to download all the games and run them without drm.
Yeah, I too can make wildly lofty promises that probably won't need to ever be verified.
Valve is one of the few companies I would someone trust with this promise... So long as the current people in charge are still in charge.
Whoever takes over might have very different ideas.
This is exactly my issue with every single company. They start off great and then the original owner/CEO croaks and we get Mr/Mrs Chicago Business School asshole who swoops in For The Shareholders™ and burns all the goodwill to the ground in the name of Profits!™©®
Valve is currently a private company, which is likely why they've been able to avoid enshittification for so long. All we can do is hope that whoever eventually takes over when Gabe steps down also has his ideals at heart.
They won't. It will go to the highest bidder. Every company does. Stop thinking your favourite one is a special exception. The problem is systemic.
That's my problem with all of patent and copyright. The people who make something matter are not the money people who claimed it all.
Things can definitely change, but I've got half a dozen games that still run that you can't get on steam anymore. You can also add games that steam doesn't sell so I get the skepticism but so far they've been good
Can't buy or can't install anymore? Because that's a huge difference in my book.
You can reinstall any game you've purchased even after it's no longer being sold.
That's what I meant to imply.
They can revoke stuff from your library.
They just usually don't have a reason to do so.
(Also, you might not be able to get older versions of the game anymore. Meaning that you may be stuck with unwanted content changes in some games.)
They can't revoke anything if it's not installed where they think it is.
😈
Well they can revoke your ability to use the Steam client to install and access it.
But of course, fuck that. Steam doesn't need to monitor what we do with our games 24/7.
You mean the last part is not correct. I did forget that I heard that point before. However, it is still a DRM and you are relying on a promise made by a for-profit company that it will be removed if necessary. I don't think history showed this kind of trust is deserved. Steam is doing good right now and has a strong founder and leader. What happens when he's gone in 20 years, and the company has financial troubles?
That's a good policy. As long as the right people are still around to enforce it, it's a little reassuring.
Yeah I mean that's a fundamental problem.
We can a) trust people/companies as long as they don't give us a reason to not trust them.
Or b) we can never trust anyone but then this discussion is pointless anyway.
If there was no DRM we wouldn't need to trust anyone to undo it.
Or if that emergency release of the DRM was a contractual guarantee we had at point of purchase, we'd also need less trust.
Uh...ALL of them? I'm gonna need more storage.
There's literally no way they could do that without being sued into ashes.
They can do that for games using steam drm. Even for games using custom drm they can let it remain on your pc if you have already downloaded it, it's not their duty to remove games from your pc even if devs pull games from steam. Whether custom drm games continue to work or not will depend on if they phone home are not.
Anyone can be sued obviously, but there will be no ashes, they aren't random Joes to be afraid of legal trolls.
Explain
So thanks to not having signed in for a couple months, I actually still had notifications from the last time I chatted about this, and here's the information someone else found when they looked into it.
https://leminal.space/comment/2351525 (see this excerpted comment chain)
In summary, this "policy" is at best someone (maybe even GabeN) stating back in 2009 and 2013 that games will still be (somehow) made available to customers if Steam shuts down.
As far as I know (please correct me if I'm wrong), there's nothing in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that obligates Steam/Valve to do it. And even if there were, there's nothing saying they can't just update the SSA to remove such a term.
Furthermore, even if Valve wants to do this if Steam ever shuts down, considering Steam's size I'd say it's less likely to be shut down and more likely to just get sold off if Valve ever does become insolvent, and the new owner of Steam can't be held to this promise anyway.
So, while it'd definitely be good if this were the case, this seems to be more wishful than written-in-stone.
Usefull idiot talk.