What WOULD happen to our purchases if Steam goes bankrupt?

[Fanatical Meat]

Sorry, that's a 'don't bother to read further' post. Terrible analogy.

It is just a fantasy to pretend a company valued at 4 billion plus that also is the market leader would just “go out of business” one morning.

 

[GrumpyMan]

This applies only to myself of course, but I view pc games the way I view my clothes. I have a closet full of clothes that I think I will wear again, but eventually I throw them out after a decade or so. For me PC games are the same. I have a huge library of games from Steam that I keep telling myself that I will replay. But I don't like to replay games mostly, may play them 2 or 3 times, but that's it. And I keep buying the newest ones that I may like. So if they do close up shop, I will just move on to the next platform, whatever that may be at the time.

 

[Stg-Flame]

I can't download 2,500 games.

I'm fairly certain if you have 2,500 games on Steam, the vast majority of them are under 10GB and with storage devices getting bigger and better, it wouldn't be that difficult to just grab a few spare external drives and download your games (assuming you're not trying to use a limited data plan).

Why does the answer have to be any more complicated that than. it's obvious that the repository of your games going bust would affect your ability to access the repository of your games. The whole question is silly in the first place. You KNEW this was the case when Steam launched but only now you are starting to see the significance of not owning the product you purchased, now that you own thousands of games.

Except you don't lose access to your games. It's been covered multiple times in this thread.

 

[DigDog]

i mean, if Steam went offline tonight, you would totally lose access to your games. Even games installed on your PC do not launch unless they connect with Steam. So yeah, you would lose your games.

Granted that SOMETHING could be done afterwards and, there are multiple options, but there's the practical aspect of keeping so many games on a machine. Sure some games are 5-10Gb, but some are 80Gb. You ain't storing 10Tb of games on a single PC.

Probably the IP owner of a game could obtain the steamid of every game owner and offer them an offline installer, maybe the games could be kept on online servers owned by the IP owner, a solution *could* be found, heck maybe another company could purchase Steam. But as i wrote above the reality of what the situation would be would depend on what catastrophical event would cause Steam's business model to fail completely. 50Tb storage? A new compression algorithm that shrinks games down to 200Mb ? The world moving exclusively to MMO games?
It's dubious any of these would happen.

 

[Craig234]

Ya, it's a more 'years from now' topic. You could spend hundreds with Microsoft on "Age of Empires Online" content - they're still in business, but you lost all of that. I effectively lost a lot of games I'd bought from an online seller when they went out of business (they did make some arrangements, but I lost track).

 

[TheELF]

This is a fantasy. We've already seen this where XP/Vista users are locked out of their games because Steam no longer supports those platforms. Soon that'll happen to Windows 7 users.

"Oh well you should just upgrade" is an invalid statement. If a currently working game has a minimum requirement of XP, why should should XP/Vista/7 users be forced to upgrade?

Isn't that, at least partly, why they made the linux version?
It has the same if not lower requirements than XP would have and linux still has security updates.
Just because someone is crazy enough to still go online with a XP system doesn't mean that valve has to support such a crazy thing.

 

[Stg-Flame]

i mean, if Steam went offline tonight, you would totally lose access to your games.

Oh, you meant it in the same vein as "would you be able to use your PC if your power just turned off?" which is a pretty ridiculous question to ask in this thread. Steam, just like any other major platform, wouldn't just turn off overnight like someone flicked a light switch and walked out the door. Besides, we still wouldn't lose our games because they would still be in the Steam database. We wouldn't be able to access them for a short period of time (aside from all those games we can still play in offline mode) but that's not really any different than when Steam just does maintenance on Tuesdays.

 

[DigDog]

Oh, you meant it in the same vein as "would you be able to use your PC if your power just turned off?" which is a pretty ridiculous question to ask in this thread.

exactly

 

[Rifter]

Really this is a who cares question. One could find alternative ways of obtaining these games pretty easily if needed, and i wouldn't even feel slightly bad about doing so if steam just closed shop and didnt release a patch to remove the steam drm as gabe has said repeatedly that he would do.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Really this is a who cares question. One could find alternative ways of obtaining these games pretty easily if needed, and i wouldn't even feel slightly bad about doing so if steam just closed shop and didnt release a patch to remove the steam drm as gabe has said repeatedly that he would do.

Given how ISPs have been cracking down on pirating and P2P in general, it's not that easy anymore unless you got in one of those private trade forums before places like JJT and F2SP got shut down. Also, given that many of the games on Steam are indie games that were only released on Steam, it's highly unlikely you'd find them anywhere else.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Given how ISPs have been cracking down on pirating and P2P in general, it's not that easy anymore unless you got in one of those private trade forums before places like JJT and F2SP got shut down. Also, given that many of the games on Steam are indie games that were only released on Steam, it's highly unlikely you'd find them anywhere else.

But as stated multiple times, Valve has already stated what they would do in the event that this were to ever happen. They intend to allow everyone to be able to download all their games and remove the requirements to connect to steam from those downloaded games so that they would work without needing access anymore. Sure, you might lose multiplayer aspects of some games that rely on steam matchmaking, but I suspect that people would have workarounds for any kind of popular game quickly (heck we had workarounds keeping the original World of Warcraft versions up and running, so much so that Blizzard realized there was such a high demand for it that they came back and re-released it).

 

[BFG10K]

Valid points but worst case scanarios
Here’s my thought
As said steam is worth far too much money to just close shop. Even if they did I’d bet money some other game front would honor steams game keys, somehow.

The issue isn't Steam going out of business. The actual issues include:

• Your account gets locked through no fault of your own (e.g. hacking) and is never reinstated.
• GabeN dies and another vendor takes over with even more draconian rules (e.g. a constant internet connection required for all games, like Blizzard does on their platform).
• Your platform of choice is no longer supported by Steam, as is the case of XP/Vista/7. If someone wants to legacy box/VM/dual-boot they can't because Steam prevents them from accessing their legally purchased titles.

Speaking of which how many game key can one reasonably expect to track if you are using all physical media,

I store my game keys digitally. You store your phone and email contacts the same way, do you not? Why should games be any different? There's nothing magical about a game key, it's just numbers and letters like an email address.

how many CD/DVD will degrade over decades, will it be possible to buy a dvd drive that reads old games in 10/15/20 years.

I have CDs from the 90s that still read fine to this day. I've also backed them up to multiple redundant ISOs.

Likewise, you can download thousands of abandonware games from the 1980s onwards and run them on dozens of emulated platforms like DOSBox.

How long should one expect to own a game.

What a silly question to ask. Since when is a game a perishable/consumable item?

How long should one expect to own a book or magazine?
How long should one expect to own jewelry or furniture?
How long should one expect to own a house, building or hotel?
How long should one expect to own a fireplace, chimney, or brick & mortar?

It's absolutely nonsensical to ascribe "shelf life" to games, as if they're some raw piece of meat sitting on an un-refrigerated shelf. A Roman Aqueduct can stand for two thousand years, yet game ownership is restricted to a few years? LOL.

This dumb notion has come from DRM stripping away ownership rights, not from software having any intrinsic "degradation".

Somehow I’m not all that upset about the various PS1 or PS2 or Atari 2600 games that I can no longer play because the hardware failed. Personally I don’t buy a game with the expectation that I’ll indefinitely find the game fun and I’ll indefinitely be able to play it.

Atari 2600 Emulators

www.emulator-zone.com

Playstation Emulators

www.emulator-zone.com

Playstation 2 Emulators

www.emulator-zone.com

We put such odd expectations on games that we don’t put on other software or other items.

The only odd expectation is treating infinitely replicable 1s and 0s in a virtual world as consumable physical goods. How are games the same as frozen meat or a toner catridge? Games don't "run out" or "spoil".

 

[BFG10K]

Isn't that, at least partly, why they made the linux version?

Linux can't run anything. Waving your hand and saying "just use WINE" doesn't count.

Just because someone is crazy enough to still go online with a XP system doesn't mean that valve has to support such a crazy thing.

What are you talking about? Who said anything about going online or Valve supporting anything?

If I want legacy XP box/VM/Dual-Boot to play games that don't work well on Windows 10, that's my business. I purchased the games, I met the minimum requirement, and they were working fine until Valve pulled the plug.

Valve doesn't have to "support" anything, they just need to send that promised killswitch and deactivate Steam requirement for XP/Vista/7, and any other platforms they ditch in the future. Steam DRM is the problem here, not XP or the game.

Of course we all know such a thing is a myth. I mean does anyone really expect a company to send out an update post-bankruptcy that removes all restrictions on its software so anyone can freely use it? LMAO.

Remember GFWL? How about Securom? Those companies aren't even bankrupt, yet we still got no mass update to free those games. Instead we relied on cracks to circumvent them.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

snip

1) I store my game keys digitally.

2) I've also backed them up to multiple redundant ISOs.

I totally get the what happens if Gabe dies or sells for reasons. As I said earlier valve sounds like an incredibly disfunctional, chaotic mess of an office place but for whatever reasons Gabe seems to thrive with it. Any change in ownership would be huge changes.

Back to game stuff you have valid points and ideas however they work for you not everyone.

Item #1 is around 5 times more effort than I want to bother with
Item #2 is around 1,000 times more effort. I think I may have downloaded an emulator once.

I’m just not that attached to my games, I enjoy playing them but when I’m done I have little interest in them except for the very rare exception.

 

[ondma]

Does steam have assets?

The reason why they are so profitable is that it costs them very little to operate. They dont need to take on the costs of transport, warehousing and sotcking, they promote almost exclusively through their own platform and have relatively little staff. All they pay for is a (small?) R&D department and some servers.

But that's besides the point. The question is a hypothetical just like "what would happen if the sun disappeared"

Q:What would ahppen to your games if steam went bankrupt?
A: DUH you would lose your games.

Why does the answer have to be any more complicated that than. it's obvious that the repository of your games going bust would affect your ability to access the repository of your games. The whole question is silly in the first place. You KNEW this was the case when Steam launched but only now you are starting to see the significance of not owning the product you purchased, now that you own thousands of games.




Realistically though they are not going out of business, nor are they going to in the foreseeable future. Intel isnt going bust. Google isnt going bust. They are too well established, so much so that the market depends on them.
Explanation: Steam sells games. Games will continue to get produced. Game producers want to sell games, they want to be on the N1 platform. This makes Steam the N1 platform.
And Steam is very profitable in doing what it does. Think that when EPIC tried to steal market share they did absolutely nothing, because they are so entrenched that they arenot worried by the competition. God knows what their war chest is like. Also, what exactly would make them go bust ... ? Maybe lose some market share in the coming years, but to have their business model fail completely? I just dont see that happening.

Steam generates it own demand and supply. It was unthinkable for people to own a THOUSAND games a few years before steam ... you bought a game, you played it for a while .. you got sick of it and you threw it out. Steam has created the concept of a games marketplace which is its own market. They literally created teh market they operate in.

They are not going bust unless some MAJOR event happens in the global economy.

Yea, games are still being produced, but there is a strong trend for the publishers to develop their own platform. Just look at the recent AAA games that are not available on Steam: Modern Warfare, Borderlands 3, the latest Metro Game, RDR2, etc. I hated Steam in the beginning, but now am sorry to see them being squeezed out by in-house distribution. Epic Games is especially annoying because their offline mode is crap, at least for BL3 PC. I dont see Steam going out of business, but they are definitely losing their position of dominance.

 

[DigDog]

Yea, games are still being produced, but there is a strong trend for the publishers to develop their own platform. Just look at the recent AAA games that are not available on Steam: Modern Warfare, Borderlands 3, the latest Metro Game, RDR2, etc. I hated Steam in the beginning, but now am sorry to see them being squeezed out by in-house distribution. Epic Games is especially annoying because their offline mode is crap, at least for BL3 PC. I dont see Steam going out of business, but they are definitely losing their position of dominance.

yes absolutely, this is true. But this scenario estabilishes that Steam may weane as a platform, not dramatically crash. Not Blockbuster-like here one day, completely gone the next.

 

[ondma]

yes absolutely, this is true. But this scenario estabilishes that Steam may weane as a platform, not dramatically crash. Not Blockbuster-like here one day, completely gone the next.

Yea, dont see them totally collapsing, at least until Gabe leaves. I actually have money in my steam wallet from Christmas gift cards from 2018. Pretty much have all the older games I want in the Steam library already, and the new games I am interested in (Borderlands 3, Metro Exodus, Modern Warfare) are not available on Steam.

 

[DigDog]

between BFG and Meat, i think you are *both* right. I can see the good in the argument of someone who wants to keep and item, but also in the argument of someone who says that particular item is something they enjoy consuming without the necessity to keep it forever. Again, BFG's argument of "i WANT to keep it forever" is just as valid.

The point here is "what if some third party takes away your implied right of ownership?"

Becauser Steam never really stated categorically if they take responsibility for your ownership. They never said "your games will be available forever and if they are not, then Steam takes liability".

Correct me if i am wrong here. But also i would preentively state that, if they have, that could well have been marketing fluff; unless they said "HERE is how we insure that your games will always be available" then i wouldn't believe them.

Now that we have out of the way the silly question "but what if Steam magically ceases to exist", then we have the more reasonable "what if Steam locks you out of your games in another way" and please note that any solution here must NOT include piracy. If you chose to include piracy then there is no need to legitimately purchase the games in the first place, right?

Now, i would think that Steam will walk the line with dropping support for a very think chunk of their games, so few that the amount of complaints will be minimal. Yeah eventually some weird-ass ol DOS games will stop working, and maybe 5 people will complain, but as a business they won't be affected.

What is more realistic is that Steam offsets the responsibilty to YOU, for example, they say "Steam no longer supports XP", but set up the platform in a way that they KNOW the community can write a 5min hack that allows XP to continue working, so they get the XP users to STILL continue supporting steam, while having none of the responsibility of supporting them back.

That is going to be a concern for fringe users and none fo median users. People like BFG are gonna get shafted, and consumers like Meat are gonna be happy. Your God Of War and FIFA will continue working, but your C64 games will not. ... i mean, rather than a possibilty, i see that as an almost certain fact. And once you do get shafted, you are gonna have to find a non-Steam way to help yourself.

 

[TheELF]

Linux can't run anything. Waving your hand and saying "just use WINE" doesn't count.

While it doesn't have great support it does run a lot of games.

What are you talking about? Who said anything about going online or Valve supporting anything?

If I want legacy XP box/VM/Dual-Boot to play games that don't work well on Windows 10, that's my business. I purchased the games, I met the minimum requirement, and they were working fine until Valve pulled the plug.

Yeah,that's where you are wrong,you buy a licence to play a game on steam you do not buy a licence to play the game on anything you want and without steam running on top,that's what GOG does.
As long as the game runs on steam,no matter how badly or on what platform,they do not have to do anything no matter how much we dislike that,that's what they promise that's what you buy.

 

[BFG10K]

While it doesn't have great support it does run a lot of games.

Linux can't run anything.

Yeah,that's where you are wrong,you buy a licence to play a game on steam you do not buy a licence to play the game on anything you want and without steam running on top,that's what GOG does.
As long as the game runs on steam,no matter how badly or on what platform,they do not have to do anything no matter how much we dislike that,that's what they promise that's what you buy.

What are you babbling about? Right now the requirements for Jedi Academy listed right off Steam:

For Steam to continue listing unsupported OSes is fraud and false advertising, which is illegal.

But go right ahead, explain to us in your own words how to run Jedi Academy purchased on Steam on any of those OSes without cracks. Thanks.

 

[TheELF]

Linux can't run anything.


What are you babbling about? Right now the requirements for Jedi Academy listed right off Steam:

For Steam to continue listing unsupported OSes is fraud and false advertising, which is illegal.

But go right ahead, explain to us in your own words how to run Jedi Academy purchased on Steam on any of those OSes without cracks. Thanks.

1.that's the requirements for the physical version
2.that info is not provided by steam but by the devs
3.If you buy a product that runs on another product then the requirements for the former are completely irrelevant,since you have to run the latter.

Be my guest and go sue disney for fraud and false advertising,let's see how that goes.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Does steam even allow someone to purchase a game on an unsupported OS?
As in if I was running vista would steam allow me to purchase a game that requires windows 10?

 

[Stuka87]

Why is this even a discussion? Steam is one of the most valuable gaming companies in the world. Even if somehow they mismanaged their huge income so poorly that they could no longer be financially feasible, there are any number of companies that would happily swoop in and buy them.

Steam/Valve are not going anywhere.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

1.that's the requirements for the physical version
2.that info is not provided by steam but by the devs
3.If you buy a product that runs on another product then the requirements for the former are completely irrelevant,since you have to run the latter.

Be my guest and go sue disney for fraud and false advertising,let's see how that goes.

not to mention steam is pretty easy on refunds.

 

[TheELF]

Why is this even a discussion? Steam is one of the most valuable gaming companies in the world. Even if somehow they mismanaged their huge income so poorly that they could no longer be financially feasible, there are any number of companies that would happily swoop in and buy them.

Steam/Valve are not going anywhere.

Well let's say that in 10 years internet will have become good enough for stadia and other similar platforms to work and be more convenient for people and steam closes down because it's not lucrative anymore...
If someone swoops in to buy steam it won't be to keep it working but to split it up and make as much money as possible.