I still play games I bought ten years ago. Can you definitively say that the same will be true for content you purchase using Steam? What about 20 years from now? The value of your purchase is now directly tied to the success of the company. In other words, their choice of using DRM is taking actual value away from you. Arguably, a pirate wont have these issues.
That will be 10 or 20 years from now, Steam's convenience is today. If it really becomes an issue, some form of piracy will always be available to recover those games.
20 years ago games came on floppies and ran on DOS. If I want to play one today, the legality of my copy is really the least of the hurdles.
Not really. I still play Master of Orion on a regular basis, and it came out in 1991. Same with the original Civilization from 1990.
The reason I can still play these games is because I have a copy of them. That's the point in question here. Do I really have a copy of Portal 2? It's on my computer now, sure. But will I be able to fire it up and reminisce in 2031?
That was true for games that came out prior to mass dialup and then mass broadband. Since then I have an ever increasing stack of games (and other software) that are unplayable as companies decided that keeping the auth servers up was too expensive (or the company folded, the IPs were sold off and the auth servers brought down). Either way, that disc is pretty much a meaningless waste of space now. BTW, anyone want this awesome System Shock 2 coaster?
The sheer mass of games that depend on steam and the number of companies involved do a lot to ensure that people will act to keep it up far more so than single-game servers.
I never liked this argument. If you weigh up the disadvantage of the possibility of Steam going under in the future and your games being rendered unplayable with the advantages of instant updating, single social interface and ease of delivery that Steam provides I like to think that it's a good example of the consumer winning.
To me it's a bit like suggesting that you should just photocopy a book rather than buying it because if you buy it the pages may wear out one day.
Half-Life was released in 1998. I can still play it--using the product key from my original retail purchase!--via Steam.
Can I definitively say that this will hold for all my current Steam purchases? No, of course not. I can, however, say that Valve has demonstrated the ability to keep giving me access to my games over a period of more than a decade.
In contrast, I have many games on CD that I can't play any more, because they don't work on modern operating systems. Some of these I've repurchased through gog.com, just to get working versions. Some I've repurchased even though they still work, just to get versions that don't require five CDs to install.
Buying a game from Steam is a calculated risk. It comes with advantages: No need to fiddle with discs, automatic patch updates, and access to all my games from any networked computer. It comes with one big disadvantage: The potential of losing access to my games at some unspecified point in the future.
That's a pretty good tradeoff for me. Maybe it isn't for you, and that's okay. When I consider Valve's established track record, however, I believe that the odds of Steam providing my games for long enough are very good--where "long enough" is "until the game ceases to work on newer operating systems and/or becomes available for repurchase for trivial amounts of money".
And if they fail me, there's always piracy. After all, I'm hardly going to feel guilty or morally culpable for resorting to piracy to reacquire access to something that I already own.
