LinustheBold: Quoted on Reddit, when a user asked Steam Customer Support what would happen if Steam went out of business. The response:
http://i.imgur.com/4sa1Ln6.jpg I doubt that the customer service rep answering that actually has any idea if that would be even feasible or not. Still, you can't blame them because they need to provide an acceptable, uncontroversial answer somehow.
There really is no telling what would happen if Valve were to monumentally collapse. If they disappeared in meteoric fashion, it's possible that negotiating rights with publishers/developers would not be feasible and thus many games would not be legally licensed to the people that paid for them anymore. To think that Valve has the legal ability to simply flip a switch and make your entire library basically DRM-Free without upsetting a great number of publishers and breaking distribution contracts is very naive.
Many people like to argue that Valve is too huge to fail. I'll bet a lot of people said the same thing about Enron, Arthur Anderson, AOL, Compaq, Lehman Brothers, Pacific Gas & Electric, Pan Am, Washington Mutual, Standard Oil, Full Tilt Poker, Montgomery Ward, Woolworth's, Bernie Madoff, Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae, and countless other large companies/governments/organizations around the world. The point is, no company is ever too large to be immune to a catastrophic collapse, and often times the bigger they are the harder they fall.
