What WOULD happen to our purchases if Steam goes bankrupt?

[Craig234]

Some of us have (many) thousands of dollars spent on games on Steam. We act like they can't go out of business. They can. What if they do, say in 8 years and we want to keep our games?

Seems like there's a hope they'll somehow figure out a way to let us keep our games. Even while game companies have made people lose thousands in purchases before, especially when MMO's shut down. Companies go out of business.

 

[JTsyo]

Download your games and play in offline mode. Multiplayer games would have to depend on the devs or 3rd party support.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Some of us have (many) thousands of dollars spent on games on Steam. We act like they can't go out of business. They can. What if they do, say in 8 years and we want to keep our games?

Seems like there's a hope they'll somehow figure out a way to let us keep our games. Even while game companies have made people lose thousands in purchases before, especially when MMO's shut down. Companies go out of business.

More pressing question is will your games run on hardware in 8 years?

Steam is far to valuable of a company to just close up shop and be gone. Someone would buy them. Microsoft has attempted to buy steam for around a decade.

 

[KeithP]

Some of us have (many) thousands of dollars spent on games on Steam. We act like they can't go out of business. They can. What if they do, say in 8 years and we want to keep our games?

Someone already did the smart thing and asked Valve this exact question. I bet if you search you can find the answer.

-KeithP

 

[shortylickens]

Gabe has repeatedly said he would make all your stuff available for download and offline use without Steam IF something ever caused Valve to go bankrupt.
And I know people are pissed off at Gabe for various things but thats because we hold him to a much higher standard than Donald Trump or Bill Gates.
He's also been considerably more honest and straightforward than Donald or Bill. I believe him.

 

[whm1974]

More pressing question is will your games run on hardware in 8 years?

Steam is far to valuable of a company to just close up shop and be gone. Someone would buy them. Microsoft has attempted to buy steam for around a decade.

I don't know about Microsoft buying Valve would be a good thing for us. Don't they already have a game store? Will they support Linux Gaming?

 

[balloonshark]

If MS buys Steam I'll never spend another dollar since I bought a ton of (luckily cheap) music from their now defunct music store. It's the same reason why I won't buy movies from them unless the movie connects to other services.

 

[Craig234]

If MS buys Steam I'll never spend another dollar since I bought a ton of (luckily cheap) music from their now defunct music store. It's the same reason why I won't buy movies from them unless the movie connects to other services.

I bought Age of Empires Online content, all lost.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Even Microsoft isn’t closing a business worth somewhere around 4 Billion and has millions of users.
In this hypothetical scenario Microsoft may cause steam to suck but we’d still have our games.

More likely scenario is Gabe dies, what happens to steam/valve. Who inherits it and do they attempt to run steam or whom do they decide to sell steam to.
As a business steam sounds incredibly dysfunctional, whomever is to run it I cannot imagine it staying the same.
For some reason Gabe appears to be excellent at managing chaos.

Valve is like a small business two investors at start, Gabe being the main guy and no voting stock holders.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Someone already did the smart thing and asked Valve this exact question. I bet if you search you can find the answer.

-KeithP

Not only was it already asked and answered, it was addressed around 2003 (if I'm remembering right).

 

[Craig234]

Not only was it already asked and answered, it was addressed around 2003 (if I'm remembering right).

Oh, well if a question was answered in 2003, then everyone who has it after that should go find the 2003 answer. New rule for Anandtech, only questions never asked are allowed.

 

[aigomorla]

only questions never asked are allowed

lol.... lets imagine if we were hardcore like this...

This would play out...

*Checking box next to everyone's name.*
*checking send warning*

You guys should all get a TOS violation email soon as per craig's request.
(sarcasm)

Also i highly doubt valve would just go belly up.
Im sure an acquisition would happen, where someone either EA, UbiSoft, or someone will purchase the entire platform.

 

[whm1974]

lol.... lets imagine if we were hardcore like this...

This would play out...

*Checking box next to everyone's name.*
*checking send warning*

You guys should all get a TOS violation email soon as per craig's request.
(sarcasm)

Also i highly doubt valve would just go belly up.
Im sure an acquisition would happen, where someone either EA, UbiSoft, or someone will purchase the entire platform.

As long as they are good good to gamers and support Linux I'm perfectly fine with someone else.

 

[aigomorla]

As long as they are good good to gamers and support

we no longer live in the 20th century where you actually get something called personalized support.

 

[whm1974]

we no longer live in the 20th century where you actually get something called personalized support.

What the Hell does that have do with Linux versions of PC Games???

 

[GoodRevrnd]

Gabe has repeatedly said he would make all your stuff available for download and offline use without Steam IF something ever caused Valve to go bankrupt.
And I know people are pissed off at Gabe for various things but thats because we hold him to a much higher standard than Donald Trump or Bill Gates.
He's also been considerably more honest and straightforward than Donald or Bill. I believe him.

But Gabe is 57 and 300lbs, we need to consider a post-Gaben world.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

we no longer live in the 20th century where you actually get something called personalized support.

I know whm isn’t talking game support so I’m not finger pointing.
People wanting support for games or mmos are weird. What sort of support do you need. Install the game and it either works or doesn’t work. I cannot imagine sending a message or making a call to some game company and them giving me info to make the game work.

 

[DigDog]

thats a very unlikey scenario. quote:
"..the [2017] $4.3 billion in revenue doesn't take into account sales of DLC, in-app purchases or microtransactions. "
steam aint going nowhere

 

[BFG10K]

Download your games and play in offline mode.

That's not how it works. Steam still connects even when set offline and won't run if it or the game is out of date. And good luck permanently disabling your internet connection because Steam can't run like that forever.

More pressing question is will your games run on hardware in 8 years?

I play games as old as 1994 natively on my 2060 Super using November 2019 build of Win10-64. DOSBox/emulated games can be even older dating back to the early 1980s.

Gabe has repeatedly said he would make all your stuff available for download and offline use without Steam IF something ever caused Valve to go bankrupt.

This is a fantasy. We've already seen this where XP/Vista users are locked out of their games because Steam no longer supports those platforms. Soon that'll happen to Windows 7 users.

"Oh well you should just upgrade" is an invalid statement. If a currently working game has a minimum requirement of XP, why should should XP/Vista/7 users be forced to upgrade? If the mythical kill switch existed we'd have already seen it in action.

And how exactly do you think a bankrupt company will continue to supply cloud services for hosting tens of thousands of games for millions of user? Where will the funding come from?

Bottom line: for all practical purposes, if Steam goes down you've lost all of your games except for the rare ones that have no Steam DRM. Or the ones you can get working cracks for. Imagining any other scenario is delusion.

I started this thread to raise awareness: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/the-anti-drm-thread.2552393/unread

 

[Fanatical Meat]

That's not how it works. Steam still connects even when set offline and won't run if it or the game is out of date. And good luck permanently disabling your internet connection because Steam can't run like that forever.


I play games as old as 1994 natively on my 2060 Super using November 2019 build of Win10-64. DOSBox/emulated games can be even older dating back to the early 1980s.


This is a fantasy. We've already seen this where XP/Vista users are locked out of their games because Steam no longer supports those platforms. Soon that'll happen to Windows 7 users.

"Oh well you should just upgrade" is an invalid statement. If a currently working game has a minimum requirement of XP, why should should XP/Vista/7 users be forced to upgrade? If the mythical kill switch existed we'd have already seen it in action.

And how exactly do you think a bankrupt company will continue to supply cloud services for hosting tens of thousands of games for millions of user? Where will the funding come from?

Bottom line: for all practical purposes, if Steam goes down you've lost all of your games except for the rare ones that have no Steam DRM. Or the ones you can get working cracks for. Imagining any other scenario is delusion.

I started this thread to raise awareness: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/the-anti-drm-thread.2552393/unread

Valid points but worst case scanarios
Here’s my thought
As said steam is worth far too much money to just close shop. Even if they did I’d bet money some other game front would honor steams game keys, somehow. Speaking of which how many game key can one reasonably expect to track if you are using all physical media, how many CD/DVD will degrade over decades, will it be possible to buy a dvd drive that reads old games in 10/15/20 years.
How long should one expect to own a game. Somehow I’m not all that upset about the various PS1 or PS2 or Atari 2600 games that I can no longer play because the hardware failed. Personally I don’t buy a game with the expectation that I’ll indefinitely find the game fun and I’ll indefinitely be able to play it.
We put such odd expectations on games that we don’t put on other software or other items.

 

[Stg-Flame]

What the Hell does that have do with Linux versions of PC Games???

I still don't understand why you're fighting this.

 

[Craig234]

thats a very unlikey scenario. quote:
"..the [2017] $4.3 billion in revenue doesn't take into account sales of DLC, in-app purchases or microtransactions. "
steam aint going nowhere

We just don't know. Remember Betamax? Woolworths? Whoever made 3D techology for TVs? RCA? Circuit City and CompUSA?

 

[Craig234]

Download your games and play in offline mode. Multiplayer games would have to depend on the devs or 3rd party support.

I can't download 2,500 games.

 

[DigDog]

We just don't know. Remember Betamax? Woolworths? Whoever made 3D techology for TVs? RCA? Circuit City and CompUSA?

Does steam have assets?

The reason why they are so profitable is that it costs them very little to operate. They dont need to take on the costs of transport, warehousing and sotcking, they promote almost exclusively through their own platform and have relatively little staff. All they pay for is a (small?) R&D department and some servers.

But that's besides the point. The question is a hypothetical just like "what would happen if the sun disappeared"

Q:What would ahppen to your games if steam went bankrupt?
A: DUH you would lose your games.

Why does the answer have to be any more complicated that than. it's obvious that the repository of your games going bust would affect your ability to access the repository of your games. The whole question is silly in the first place. You KNEW this was the case when Steam launched but only now you are starting to see the significance of not owning the product you purchased, now that you own thousands of games.




Realistically though they are not going out of business, nor are they going to in the foreseeable future. Intel isnt going bust. Google isnt going bust. They are too well established, so much so that the market depends on them.
Explanation: Steam sells games. Games will continue to get produced. Game producers want to sell games, they want to be on the N1 platform. This makes Steam the N1 platform.
And Steam is very profitable in doing what it does. Think that when EPIC tried to steal market share they did absolutely nothing, because they are so entrenched that they arenot worried by the competition. God knows what their war chest is like. Also, what exactly would make them go bust ... ? Maybe lose some market share in the coming years, but to have their business model fail completely? I just dont see that happening.

Steam generates it own demand and supply. It was unthinkable for people to own a THOUSAND games a few years before steam ... you bought a game, you played it for a while .. you got sick of it and you threw it out. Steam has created the concept of a games marketplace which is its own market. They literally created teh market they operate in.

They are not going bust unless some MAJOR event happens in the global economy.

 

[Craig234]

But that's besides the point. The question is a hypothetical just like "what would happen if the sun disappeared"

Sorry, that's a 'don't bother to read further' post. Terrible analogy.