How do you suppose it would work? How will VALVe make anything available for download if they shut down? Unless they shut down for a reason other than financial, I don't see anyone funding the servers to download their games from. Gabe Newell, if he actually said that is incredibly naive and unable to plan realistic outcomes to events, or he is full of shit.

Nothing happens to your games or your right to play them. If you've purchased a license to play a game, you still have the license. Provided you have them downloaded nothing changes. Storage is cheap in relation to the cost of the PC's needed to play games. Everything you have purchased should be on local storage, that goes for GOG, Steam even consoles allow you to backup your installs. I don't take seriously any excuses for this. They are your purchases and your money and if you don't know how to backup then you need to learn if you want security.

Regardless of whether Steam makes a patch to allow offline use of their games when they fall (and everything ends eventually), you still purchased a license, you still paid the publisher and developer and you still have the right to play what you have a license for. If Steam doesn't do a patch, someone else will. As long as you backup, you will not lose your games or the right to play them.

To be fair, it's probably that CEF (Chromium Embedding Framework) dropped support for older platforms and, since the Steam client relies on it so heavily, they were forced to drop support too or stick to old versions with known security vulnerabilities.

I know that's what stopped the flow of unofficial patches to maintain Windows XP support for the Galaxy client.

Has there ever been a mass scale shut down before of a website like Steam or GOG? I don't mean some piddly unknown website. But a website where thousands and thousands of players have thousands of games stockpiled onto their accounts and then just poof once that platform shits the bed and dies? Is there even a precedent? Honestly, I don't think we truly know how it'll happen. Especially when dealing with a massive mass of paying customers who have hundreds and sometimes thousands of games on said account(s). It would be an extremely delicate situation.

Steam provides different binaries based on the OS. If you check the packages folder you'll see them.The laziest solution would have been to not push updates to non-supported operating systems anymore leaving them on the old client. Instead people have to hunt down old steam versions and/or replace dlls and hunt down the config file changes or command line switches to prevent steam updates. If they were really not lazy they wouldn't use CEF for a game launcher or provide a switch to not use it. I don't care about the browser crap and I'm sure there are many others like me. When they code Steam they could offer two paths in their code usable with a switch, bloated POS mode by default (current mode) or game launcher mode without BS (enabled via switch). It's not that hard.

Really they should leave the web browsing to web browsers but that makes too much sense.

I don't care anyway since I use other means that work quite well on all of the Steam games I own for Windows 2000 and above so I don't need Steam to play my games but it's ridiculous how people are treated and they just lap it up because "it's just a game".

I meant ethically, not legally. As far as I'm concerned, the legal side of it is largely irrelevant because it's nigh on impossible to get caught if you're halfway sensible about it.

I agree!
I hope this won't happen anytime soon.

Apparently many people don't seem to understand the meaning of digital license. Pretty baffling it should be so easy to understand but people just make it hard for themselves because they love 'DRM-free' so much unconditionally.

Let's compare two companies, Steam and GoG.

If Steam goes bankrupt, for whatever reason, most likely some others would purchase Steam and the business goes as usual. But let's make a scenario where Steam goes bankrupt and cut off all access, then there goes all your (and my) games on Steam. Pow, begone. Unless you resort to torrent. Hello Skidrow.

If GoG goes bankrupt, and it is purchased by someone else then business continues like normal, just like Steam's case. But for total disaster scenario, your licensed access also goes kaput and dead too. This means you can't download anymore your Witcher 3 unless you resort to Torrent. And guess what, Torrent has the exact same copy as you do.

So yeah, I hate to lay this out but in both cases you are going to suffer no matter what. Your poetic description that keeping offline backup means NOTHING in this connected world. Your legitimate copy of Witcher 3 has no different properties than my illegitimate copy of Witcher 3 in case GoG goes bankrupt without recourse.

Be in denial all you want, but cold, hard truth won't go away.

True, but talking about "morality of purchases" we could say downloading illegally a game you owned let´s say in a dissapeared Steam or GOG is better than download a game you never supported before. Still doesn´t mean we have "the right" to do so.

We don´t.

Witcher 3 is CDPR's property, so it's not like the game would become abandonware if GOG went down.
And the same is valid for other games, as they're owned by other devs\publishers.
So, your hypotetical pirated copy wouldn't certainly be legally equal to a bought one.
And my downloaded Witcher 3 offline installer wouldn't need any store, because it's DRM-free and complete.

What happens when an online multiplayer shuts down? Your game goes poof! no going back. There are generally no procedures for releasing the IP to the community, so those that want to, can carry on playing their game on their own servers.

Some people think that they own a game because they bought it on steam or some other store. They don't, its basically rented and can be withdrawn from them at any time. Account closed. Your pre-order special edition game is pixie dust.

Admittedly, I have a bleak distopian view of the future of PC gaming as I think the trend seems to be towards delivering gaming content always online which will eventually lead to streaming services and then no amount of torrenting will help you to play the game you want without paying through the nose. You will be renting time and paying microtransactions to play games in future from a client, unless off course there are some really clever people out there who can circumvent that too.

I'm hoping GoG will buck the trend and be able to stick to their values of the past. At least we can still back up their current games and use them offline, but I wonder whether that will continue for long.

I'd keep installing and playing all my 1672 GOG games that I've purchased so far. The installers are on my hard disk. For instance, the other day I installed an played the GOG versions of Dungeon Keeper Gold and Startopia from my local GOG installers, without even connecting to GOG.com servers. Magic! Source? The "best" I have seen is someone's screen capture where an alleged Steam support person shortly claims something in the lines like "Don't worry, if Steam would even go offline, we would make it so that you can still play them. Just stop asking such hard questions, ok? Shut up. I said shut up! Don't call us again, we know what we are doing.". What on earth gives you that idea? That is illogical and just not believable at all.

If Valve was no more, who would run and pay the running costs for the servers where you could keep downloading your Steam games from here to eternity? That just makes no sense whatsoever, sorry.

In the case with DRM-free digital stores (including GOG.com), Desura.com and DotEmu.com give a good idea how things would most probably go, as they have been through that.

Desura users could download their games for many months I believe. I don't know if they had given any exact date before which everyone must download their games, but apparently people kept doing that for a long time. At some point I started seeing messages also here that the servers seem to be offline or they can't download anything, not sure if they are not back online or was desura bought by some other company who has revived the servers or whatever.

DotEmu, on the other hand, informed the users of closing its digital store (not the whole company I think), and gave an exact date before everyone should download their game installers. Which I did, even though I had downloaded earlier as well.

That's how I am expecting it would go if GOG would close the store. They'd "try to" offer 60 days (or even more?) for downloads, but it is understandable they can't promise it would be that long, or at all. What if martians invaded and destroyed all the download servers with their laser penis guns?

No idea how Steam would handle it, considering that it is much more tied to the client and only some games can be "downloaded" in the sense that you can archive the game and play it later, without Steam servers around. And no, I don't believe they would make all the Steam games magically DRM-free with a flip of a switch, considering many Steam games have third-party DRM as well, on top of CEG. The Valve support guy promising such was just spewing bullshit.

Talk is cheap.

Instead, buy GOG (or its parent company's) stock. Then you can get to decide GOG's business strategy. And more importantly: you will take a financial hit if your bright ideas didn't really work out as well as you thought.

How they will handle it I don't know.

But how they could handle it would be like the way you play DOS games on modern Windows. Instead of emulating an old OS you release something that emulates all the callouts of the Steam DRM so that your install knows no difference, 3rd party DRM would just work the same as currently. Even if Steam doesn't do this, someone will. In fact, it's already been done to some extent. As long you have all the game installs locally, someone- if not Steam- then someone will work out how to make them play.

Actually a good analogy is how Xbox 360 games run on Xbox One. The emulation does not touch the game code, the 360 copy protection is all still there, the emulation layer simply emulates an Xbox 360 so the game code totally thinks it's running on the real thing. The same can be done for the Steam DRM.

Not necessarily. The torrents are kept up by normal people like you and me who just sometimes stop doing it after awhile, because they get married, relocate due to studies or a new work, find something more interesting in life, become unemployed and don't want to spend money to serve others (with free games), die in a horrible squirrel-related accident etc.

Those people doing it only have a partial GOG game collection anyway. Even I don't have each and every GOG game, especially for GOG games that were removed from the store already before I even joined GOG (like those TOCA and rally car games etc..). I am ready to bet you can't find, at least easily, those early GOG games on torrents. Maybe you can find some cracked and unpatched CD-version, but probably not the GOG version.

Plus, many officials are still proactively shutting down torrent sites, so there's that too.