What happens to our games IF Steam goes out of business?

This is totally hypothetical and I am sure many of us have wondered. I tried googling this answer, but all everyone is doing is arguing and bringing up something about some permanent offline patch, but what about all the games that are not downloaded?

I am just curious about this and wonder if I should get an external HDD to back up all my games on Steam, Origin, GoG, and other distributors.

Also, like I said I know that Steam is a totally safe company and that it is not going under anytime soon, just curious.

 

I'll say what I said on STEAM, all the games go to Purgatory

 

Couldn't we just take the CD Keys from STEAM and DL the software elsewhere?

Except for Valve games and games that use VAC, wouldnt everything else work?

 

That is what I don't know CrAzYsIm...

 

This is a pointless thread if you'd actually read the ToS for STEAM but I'll go ahead and do the reading for you:

If steam goes under they have said ( many many times ) that you will be given notice to backup all of the games in your profile to any HDD which you can make as many coppies of as you wish. There will be no less than 30 days notice in the unlikely event this actually happens.

 

Asked so many times on Steam forums it's like whack-a-mole each time...

They'll let you play offline.

 

you would have plenty of notice if valve ever goes out of business. since steam is an industry standard, it's an extremely unlikely scenario. even if valve stalled as a game developer, steam itself has way too much momentum.

Steam has maybe 75% of the entire video game digital distribution market. With only a very small percentage of the market, they could easily continue to offer their services. Even that scenario is extremely unlikely.

 

download all your games and play them in offline mode, probably be a offline client to use.

 

There's already Steam "wrappers" (questionable legality) that let you play without Steam. Today you might get reprimanded for using it as they may find out. But if Steam was gone, it'd work just fine.

At one point I had every Steam game downloaded that I played, and also backed up. But I'm sure if it came to that enough people would have the game downloaded that torrenting them would become commonplace. Actually I don't know why you couldn't torrent them now because you need Steam and a key to play.

 

Seeing as steam's servers can max out very fast internet connections, there's not much of a point of setting up torrents for the game content files. Although, technically this is possible, it wouldn't be very useful. Maintaining up to date versions of the content files for even a small number of games would be incredibly time intensive. It would also be difficult to maintain a sufficiently large group of people constantly hosting the latest version of the content files. All of that trouble would go to a very small benefit in the best case (or much slower or unusable in some of the worst cases), since valve's servers are already extremely fast.

Torrents are really good for providing fast downloads without having to invest in server infrastructure. Since valve has already done this, it's sort of a moot point. Torrents also have a variety of downsides.

 

Yeah but if they were going out of business their servers would probably be hammered from everybody trying to get their games.

 

Right. I'm saying if Steam disappeared tomorrow, torrents would be the way to go. Most of the games I have downloaded today barely ever update. Just TF2, which seems to update daily, eventually uninstalled it because I almost never play it any more and don't care for it constantly downloading updates.

 

I think what will happen (with games you haven't downloaded) is what has happened to many other out-of-business digital distribution companies: we will be given a notice (not sure how long) that the company is closing and that we should download and backup whatever we had bought.

As an example: Direct 2 Drive (D2D) has been acquired by GameFly recently. They (D2D) sell both games and non-games items (i.e. game guides), and in a recent email they detailed that now under GameFly they will not offer anymore non-game items, thus urging all those buyers to download such items.

tl;dr : We'll be informed in advance to take action.

 

I'm pretty sure all of Steam's competitor would do that in a heart beat. Nothing better than to increase their user base dramatically.

 

Lets say Valve goes bankrupt.
Dont you think some competitor would buy either Valve or the Steam platform to increase marketshare against for example Origin or GameStop. (Formerly known as Impulse)

 

yes. steam is too big to fail. even if valve went under (already extremely unlikely), steam would be very likely to survive anyway

 

Ya, Like I said in the OP this is totally hypothetical scenario. Steam would be bought out for sure. I am just gonna get a 2TB External drive to back up all my games to.