Let me answer your question with a question:

In the long history of large businesses crashing, what has been the primary concern of those running/owning those businesses?:

A.) Ensuring the customers, suppliers and employees of that business don't lose out.

OR

B.) Ensuring they line their own pockets and/or avoid any responsibility for what has occurred.


Not saying there is any likelihood of Steam crashing, or that someone else wouldn't take over and carry on, but I certainly wouldn't be relying on a company's 'goodwill' or promises in the event of something bad happening.

Lol, Valve is so absurdly wealthy that Steam would probably survive a nuclear apocalypse with backup servers.

Steam also provides some games drm free, and you can get these without using the client. Don't get me wrong, I am not a steam fan at all, anything but. Unfortunately Steph the way things are it's becoming less and less of an issue, at least there is a huge catalog of top games and with all the resellers prices are rock bottom.
Even I wonder if it's worth buying another hard drive just to store games which I pay more for. Maybe that time is passiing and it would just be easier to rent the things. Can't fight "progress".

Apologies for the typos, it's this bleeding autotype.

in theory and in intention - indefinitely. It was very spotty and buggy to begin with, but now there have been reported machines being offline for months and years without any problems. Your mileage may still vary, though.

That's not entirely true. As I understand from the self help thread, Steam is still required to download the so-called Stream-free game. You may not require Steam to start them, but initially, you still had to use the Steam client to download - hence, get - the game. You only ever get the latest version, and whatever new bugs and unwanted features that may entail. And additionally, the game had to be installed by the Steam client, and to archive the game into a usable backup, you still need the Steam client to do so. Quod erat demonstrandum.

In this side of the pond, I can download each game in my library as an archive already, and I can choose to maintain several versions of the game I purchased. Download, save. All from a web browser.

I don't know how much hard drives cost wherever you are, but here in the third world, they're pretty cheap. But seeing as I get myself a new notebook every year, this probably means nothing.

I imagine after your library in Steam gets forfeited a few times, you'll begin to see why the games are sold dirt cheap (when in truth, you really shouldn't have paid for each one at all, and should have paid 1 subscription fee to access all the games).

I may not agree with the direction GOG chooses sometimes - and I have been vocal about it - but to compare what I can do with GOG versus what I can do with the greed machine that is Steam? Well, that's something else entirely. Until GOG makes the games you buy a rental service, it is the clear winner.

You can also use steam command line to download. And it's no different to using galaxy or gog downloader or gogrepo which I imagine 99% of people now use. Hdds are getting cheaper, but when you need 10tb each time it is still hugely expensive, and I am nearly at that top already so either 1 hdd at £250 or a raid 5 at around £800. As for the rest of it, that's up to you.

No.

I hear about this often, but never with sources.
Anyway, even assuming Valve actually stated that, games are property of publishers. Valve cannot do anything on them without precise contracts, and I seriously doubt that if Valve were to go out of business they would either have the resources or the contractual power to make such a thing happen. Publishers will simply let the thing die, and they would surely never renounce to an active DRM program.

So no, definitely don't trust them; I am not concerned by good or ill intentions, but a situation like that is a probably an unsolvable legal nightmare that will end in perpetual stall.

Again, Steam command line requires that Steam is installed. If you mean SteamCMD, it makes use of anexecutable that is a simply stripped down version of the Steam client which means you still use the client.

I just said using my web browser. I never said using Galaxy, the downloader or the repo.

You need 10TB each time? My entire archive doesn't even break 4TB, and that's with multiple versions + the extras. My NAS is pretty old -- enough to consider replacement options -- but so far it's not really breaking a sweat.

But as you say, your preference is yours. I will say one thing though: if renting games seems to be your thing, you're definitely in the wrong side of the pond.

Edit: Clarification on first point.

This partly depends on the developer. They're capable of offering different branches. Some use this to offer older versions of the game. Generally the games that are talked about to be 'DRM-Free' on Steam are games you can also just zip up and move to another computer and still run there without requiring additional installs.

People always seem to assume the games need to be changed if that happens (not saying it will happen) but couldn't they just put out a Steam client that doesn't require callback?

Thanks for that. If real, it's the first time I've ever seen it. Still, as I noted before if the company is in dire straits and going under, I highly doubt if they'd be putting any time and effort into unshackling their games. It's probably the last thing they'd concentrate on. Also, what AB2012 said.

I do not trust Steam, and I do not trust GOG.

I don't have to. That's the point of the offline, DRM-free installers.

That is not Gaben.

Plus, talk is cheap. No one is ever going to sue Valve over that statement by an unknown "tech person", especially if Valve is out of business.

There are many logical reasons why that statement is most probably false, and they've been covered countless of times before. There are both technical and legal hurdles there. I trust GOG is unable to break into my home in order to alter all the GOG installers on my hard drive, to add DRM into them or make them online-only. That's why I've specifically bought double locks on my front door, to stop GOG from entering my home physically (unless I invite them, of course).