We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws. Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create. We welcome the opportunity to discuss our position with policy makers and those who have led the European Citizens Initiative in the coming months.
if gabe could come out with a statement that if steam had to shut down for some reason he’d try to make sure people get to keep playing their games they have downloaded he’d probly cause these guys to have an aneurysm, but I doubt even gabe would go that far
He did say something similar years ago if I recall correctly but we never got any details and it was so long ago it’s hard to guess whether that’s still the plan. Reassurance or update on that wouldn’t be unwelcome, that’s for sure.
It was a long time ago, but I thought I heard Steam would remove their DRM and the games would not require authentication.
Though I doubt you would be able to redownload anything if their servers shut down though.
Either way it’s pure speculation considering something truly massive would have to happen for Steam to even get to this point.
You can (could?) reach out to Steam Support, and this is part of the email they reply with:
“In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network, measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.”
Not sure if they ever expounded upon those details though.
To my knowledge, they have not.