Companies rise and die all the time. Let’s just hope when Valve dies, other (not shitty) company rises to replace it.
If Valve dies and I lose thousands of dollars in games, there won’t be another company for me, pure piracy until I die.
Its gonna happen.
Cause its already happened with other services, like Direct2Drive. Lost dozens of games from that being bought/sold/going under/rebranding whatever weird as fuck path its taken to be able to keep my money and not let me have any of the games I bought.
Digital Distribution is a plague, and most people refuse to look past the tip of their instant gratification to realize it.
I argue that digital is good as long as you make backups of your games.
I have an external drive full of steam games that steam can’t touch. So I’ll always have those games. Barring I lose the drive or don’t transfer the files before it becomes unreadable.
Another example where digital is good imo is the Switch. Those tiny game cards can suck my ass. If I drop one on my carpet it’ll be gone until next spring. Having multiple games saved on SD cards is the way to go.
Other than that, I agree.
Oh we did look. Gabe’s promise was to give us warning and an unlock on all our games so it could run without steam. There might be a jam in the rush to download and backup everything.
I didn’t like digital distribution and have been burned by Stardock (for selling out to Gamestop) and then by Gamestop (for shutting down my account without cause or notice). But Steam is the least offensive of the DD offerings.
Then again I’ve never been wronged by Steam and others have. Others have, amd I understand Steam support can be ruthlessly cold.
I still have CD and DVD games I like with no DD alternative sources. (I’ll buy them from GOG when they’re on the cheap just for convenience.) Some of them have exceeded their official shelf lives, and would depend on finding a no-disc-check mod online.
In this age, we should be able to download a game from any archive and just keep our licenses. But our society and the game industry only gets more and more resentful of its customer base.
If Steam dies, I’ll likely just pirate relentlessly and only actually buy games whose dev teams I want to support. ( Terraria and DRG serve as good examples – games where lighting and mining are complex mechanics). And the industry will suffer every time a DD platforn enshittifies.
Valve did promise their customers will have a way to access their game if the company have to shutdown. But if the company got enshittified instead of dying, suck to the customers I guess.
