I too have a walled-off PC, but that is specifically for retro gaming and only has Windows 98 and DOS 6 on it. DOS 6 hardly sees any use these days thanks to DOSBox, but Windows 98 does get a bit of use for older Windows games. The reasons why the network cable stays unplugged on that one should be obvious, and as soon as reliable Windows 98 emulation becomes possible, that PC will probably be sold or given away.

Give it 3 or 4 years and the retro gaming compatibility situation will shift up a gear. Microsoft will be ceasing any and all security updates for Windows XP in 2014 and keeping an XP box safely on the net will then also become increasingly difficult.

The cycle goes on and on. Vista's EOL isn't so much of a problem because it is to Windows 7 and 8 as Windows 95 was to Windows 98 - practically no difference in the compatibility department - but there's no telling where Microsoft will take Windows.

Nobody's demanding that modern games continue to be Win98 or 3dfx compatible in this day and age (this kind of hyperbole used commonly by Steam apologists in general on this board is indicative of the weakness of the pro-Steam arguments).

It is not, however, wholly unreasonable to demand that the games that we buy continue to work on the platform that we bought them for. If I buy a game in 1994 for a DOS PC, I expect it to work on a DOS PC 10, 15 years down the line, hardware failure notwithstanding.

I built that Win98 machine four years ago collected from old spare parts bought off eBay specifically for the purpose of retro gaming. The games still work because I do not need to connect to any servers or sign into anything to play it. The most serious problem I've had in this regard is the loss of the NFS3 DLC - a few measly cars - since the servers went down.

You surely see the problem with Steam there then, not forgetting that Valve will eventually pull support for XP and that there are numerous games on Steam that will not work on anything except XP or below (Jedi Knight to quote a known example, other games like KOTOR also have severe problems on XP).

When the Steam client ceases to support XP, you are basically faced with the problem of having no Steam access on XP (which at that future time shouldn't be on the net in the first place anyway), and having games that only work on XP in your Steam account. And as I say, we're not talking a decade down the line, we're talking 3-5 years, a short space of time in a community that happily pays for and plays games that are 15-25 years old.