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If Steam were to suddenly without notice go dark, what would actually happen?
What would happen to my access to my 250 games? Is there anywhere in the ToS stating anything about this? Is it just, sorry you agreed to the ToS you are SOL?
Yes, they have a plan in case of a shutdown to disable the DRM and let you download everything, they've talked about it multiple times. But I don't think that a lot of people would even have the capacity to store all their games. Luckily for game preservation GOG exists , and their games are without DRM, plus pirates have all the games from steam cracked, so the preservation aspect is pretty much secured.
Would Steam even have the right to remove DRM from all the games they sell on their platform? It would be one thing to promise that Valve games would be released if Steam was shutting down, but another entirely to claim they can remove the DRM from all the games from other publishers on their platform.
Well they obviously can't remove third party DRM, and any store page of a game that has it features a warning about it. As per Steam's own DRM - it's a joke anyway, a simply library injection breaks it in no time, and since it relies on online-only they might just make a dummy DLL and distribute it to all "rightful owners". I don't think there is anything stopping them from just changing how the DRM works, since they've done it in the past with steampipe.
But that's in the case of a planned shutdown, known weeks in advance. If Steam suddenly goes dark, without warning, it would be an entirely different story. You wouldn't be able to download games from your library, and probably wouldn't even be able to play all of your installed games.
This article is kind of old (2012) but relevant.
I would say you loose it all, maybe if you kept a copy of the keys you could ask the individual devs for another download link, but that seems rather tedious.
With steam they are distributing the licenses to you so if they decide to stop for whatever reason, not much you can do about that.
That's kind of a hilarious and scary condition apparently part of what everyone has agreed to.
Wow, will check it out - with Devs like that how can I not?
What do you think of @NeoTheFox and the apparent plan to make all purchased games available drm-free if steam shuts down?
I've done some searching for the source, and this link to the reddit thread is the best source I can find. The Steam forum thread with Newell's response is removed, and there should be some recorded footage of Valve talking about it, but I can't find any.
I think it sounds like a real end of days idea and kind of cool. Though I wonder if valve are even allowed to do that with some of the games on there. Probably just remove their DRM but leave any other stuff like denuvo etc.
It would be quite a task though a probably quite a few games will slip through the cracks as valve franticly tries to figure it all out before they run out of time.
Likely a preservation team would crop up and work to provide cracked copies to all who are affected