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.
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.
There's literally no way they could do that without being sued into ashes.
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.