I think Greenlight is the true evil here. A lot of garbage hit the store, and sometimes is really hard discover a good game when all around are tons of ugly games. Just check the new entries on Steam, there are so much crappy games...

Let's be fair: for many developpers, exposure on Steam is the difference between recuping their development costs or not.

I wouldn't call that greedy by a long shot.

Now, publishers that release only on Steam are partly to blame, but so are gamers that have the option to buy DRM-free from GOG, DotEmu or the developper, but buy on Steam anyways.

The public has spoken and DRM-free, while definitely marketable, is a niche.

GOG needs to compete with Steam on other levels like convenience in order to get a bigger slice of the pie.

From what I have seen is the later - "Early Access is a way of making people pay to test your game!!!! I will never participate and the concept should be burned with fire!!11!! People who do are suckers! ", and most of those who actually buy alpha/beta's seem to think it is OK. The funny part is that it was an OK business model when other stores except Steam sold alpha/beta's :)

I think the comment was made very early on, so in all likelihood they were talking about Valve's own games, not everything else. Unless there is a line in every third-party contract since Steam's inception about sunsetting procedures for Steam and the removal of all protections, which I doubt.

It's kind of a moot point because the community will take care of it, they always do, but I just feel required to correct people when they act like Steam promised anything.

^This.

And the point of dumping everything together in the first place is to get people to do impulse purchases, i.e. buy the crappier games as well; if one has enough time to evaluate everything in an environment that lets them sort and filter out to their exact preferences (like ShinyLoot does with their search features), one will probably end up buying a good number of games less.

I don't have this fear, steam isn't gonna go down anytime soon, although that game you linked to in the Original Post, on the page it said "Only for monitors with screen resolution of 1920x1080" Seriously? They can't even code a different resolution.

Airplane Simulator is created by "Kill Joy". Go figure.

It would be very hard for gaming to crash as bad as it did in the 80's. Back in the 80's gaming was thought of as a kids toy. Today there are gamers in their 30's, 40's and 50's. Even my dad, who when I was kid with Atari/C64 thought it was a stupid waste of time and money, now he plays all types of games.

As it happens, Steam is down right now. It goes down almost constantly.

I know - the question is when it will go down permanently. It has enough momentum should be safe for years at least.

Short term, Steam isn't going anywhere. Valve has managed consistently top-tier PR and barring something catastrophically stupid on their part a consumer backlash isn't going to happen. Yes, there are shitty games on Steam, but that alone isn't going to be the end of them. Valve has the lion's share of the market, and there's no competitor which has a serious chance of taking it from them. There don't appear to be any major technological or business upheavals looming. The company itself is stable and growing. Whatever problems it has aren't going to kill it.

Things could change, and in fact they're bound to at some point. This is the tech industry after all, and nothing stands still. When it does come, however, it'll take you by complete surprise and it could be a very long time coming. There might be 20/20 hindsight, or maybe it'll be something totally random, but if we could casually predict it in a forum thread then I'm sure Valve is already aware and planning. It's not the devil you can see that gets you; it's the one you never saw coming.

I'm afraid that it's not that simple. In addition to what StingingVelvet said:

First off, they need the consent of devs/ pubs to patch them into a non_Steam_DRM-ed state - what happens if devs/ pubs don't consent? What if the games are deemed too old by devs/ pubs to spend time, money and resources to rework them into some other type of DRM?

Secondly, what happens to all the features that are tied to Steam? Even if the games get patched to work without Steam, will they be the same content/ feature wise? Will the devs/ pubs restore this stuff to work without/ outside Steam?

IMHO, if Steam goes down, only the games that work now without any Steam dependencies will be unaffected, the rest will suffer in one way or another.

I'm pretty sure that the Steam store is going to go through significant changes with the release of the Steamboxes. I think it's going to be quite a lot harder to be profiled on the front page. Hopefully that front page will be curated by knowledgeable people who are good at spotting quality games deserving space there, but that might be a little too optimistic given how crap Valve were at finding quality games back before they did Greenlight et.c.

Bottom line is that pretty much every PC game will be on Steam, but only some games will actually get any decent attention there. It's good news for those who know how to dig and likes to have everything they play on Steam, and good news for a lot of developers, but it will also ensure that "being on Steam" isn't going to sell games by itself any more (I think that for the most part we've passed that particular point already). So PR is going to be even more important than it is now.

Whatever happens, Steam won't die.
Steam does have an offline mode, and most games work offline. So it's unlikely that it'll be a big deal for Valve to set Steam to be offline "forever", should the need arise.

I fear it will influence the development process of many games : shorter development cycles, ultra sequelization (parallel-spin-offing, chaptering, spin-sequelling ), and more Not-a-game

The way you put it makes it sound like Steam's offline mode doesn't work "forever" on purpose. ;-P

Anyway, that still doesn't address the second part of my post - or does it?