You know, you're talking about a move of cataclysmic proportions, and one that could completely ruin the notion of downloading games. It would be like Hindenburg did for air travel - lots of heat, disillusion, and then a firm move onto the right medium, airplanes.

Makes perfect sense, according to Dogbert

Not to interrupt your whinging, but what do you expect on that point?
Do you expect Valve to be able to say "Oh, yeah. Ubi says its perfectly okay for us to make Splinter Cell DRM-free (or attach it to a new DRM model) in the event that we go out of business."? Valve only has rights like that over their games. If Steam goes down and you want to get access to your games on there from other publishers, you need to take it up with them.

That's exactly what I've been saying all this time but you wouldn't believe how many fanboys at the Steam forums pull the "Valve-will-make-ALL-games-DRM-free-if-Steam-goes-down" card and claim Gabe said so. Even mods keep spreading that misinformation and it only makes Valve look like God's gift to gaming.

Legally, they might have some right to it. I don't know. Mods are very much a grey area that few devs would threaten (unless it's using their IP). But I don't see how that means they deserve it in any real sense.

EXACTLY. It's not about whether this is would happen or not, it's about Valve helping to spread misinformation about it to appease the crowds. Developers have remarked on the forums before that they'd find a way to make the games work without Steam but that's simply not possible without the permission of everyone involved and they'd never get that permission. Steam IS the copy protection. Because Valve have been downright lying about this, they aren't exactly giving me any confidence.

Yeah, I was referring to Blizzard's case, not Valve's.

They didn't have fully functional servers, their servers had hacks galore all over them. They refused to fix exploits in a timely manner or fix the game (only one developer worked on patch 10 for an entire year or more).
Aside for that when Blizzard screamed that folks could play pirated copies on a BNetD server the BNetD guys said "You know, if it bothers you, expose a service and we'll send a query with the CDKey and you can tell the BNetD server if it's valid". Blizzard refused and sued instead.
Also, I don't know if you know what BNetD was, it was a group of programmers that reverse engineered a sever (in other words, programmed their own Diablo 2 and Starcraft server) and released the source code to anyone who wanted to run their own local server can avoid the horrid battle.net environment and yet have persistent characters with their friends. They did not steal server code and run it somewhere while charging admission, somehow.

It won't happen, I can promise you.

Here you go
Honestly that thread should be stickied so that every other thread mentioning Valve doesn't go ludicrously off-topic.

Honestly? I can see this evaporating into a non-issue. Apparently, Valve applied specifically for "DOTA", while Riot applied for "Defence of the Ancients" (and presumably for DotA as well). I can see both applications going through, since the most popular version of Defence of the Ancients is the All Stars edition, thus you can refer to WarCraft 3's Defence as DofAAS, to prevent confusion between it and Demigod, Heroes of Neworth, whatever Valve's up to and when Riot rebrands League of Legends (and then the fun begins).