Steam has been (mostly) a good citizen. But there's not much in the way of legal or technical hurdles to them going down the same path. It's all goodwill and reputation.

I hope it's enough.

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mjevans 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If steam ever goes up in smoke, there will be infinite justification to never trust download only ever again.

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fluoridation 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can at least make local backups of your Steam games. If a game is removed such that you can't even download it anymore, you can always just install it manually.

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j1436go 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's what GOG offers. And I'd advise anyone to use GOG over Steam for their principles alone. Every game you purchase through their platform is DRM free and they go to a lot of effort to preserve retro titles that would be difficult to play nowadays without a lot of tinkering. They also put no limitation on how many family members you can share your games with.

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dtech 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Steam has DRM,so no. Easily cracked yes, but then you can just go the full pirate route.

	▲	fluoridation 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The point is that with Steam you have more options than with consoles.
	▲	lordfrikk 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Not completely true, many games on Steam in fact do not have any DRM. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755132.
	▲	Hikikomori 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Optional DRM, but essentially on by default. Could maybe consider it malicious compliance as its so easy to bypass but still allows them to check the DRM checkbox.