this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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"Ubisoft take note"
Ubisoft is nothing compared to Valve... You don't own anything you purchase on Steam and it's the biggest store by a huge margin, don't know why Ubisoft is mentioned specifically...
In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network,” Valve reps have said, “measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.”
If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this Era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that "end of life" plan for it to actually be genuine.
"Valve reps have said" is worth as much as the paper it's written on and that stuff is not even written on paper.
Except they have proven this so far to be accurate. Games that have long since been removed from sale are still downloadable for people who purchased them at the time. Which is more than others can say.
But the steam network is still around. When steam actually shuts down and no longer has the infrastructure to provide downloads for games, I have no idea what their plan is. They hypothetically could provide a way to remove the DRM, but I doubt that it's something the publishers of games would allow.
Well, as the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building was overheard saying on his way down: "well, so far so good".
Or as the common caveat given to retail investors goes: past performance is no predictor of future results.
"So far" proves nothing because it can be "so far" only because the conditions for something different haven't yet happenned or it simply hasn't been in their best interest yet to act differently.
If their intentions were really the purest, most honest and genuine of all, they could have placed themselves under a contractual obligation to do so and put money aside for an "end of life plan" in a way such that they can't legally use it for other things, or even done like GoG and provided offline installer to those people who want them.
Steam have chosen to maintain their ability to claw back games in your library whilst they could have done otherwise as demonstrated by GoG which let you download offline installers - no matter what they say, their actions to keep open the option of doing otherwise say the very opposite.