The only way legitimately to play Halflife 2 is with Steam, so odds that EA would pull the plug on the life support without warning and with the entire worlds gaming press likely to jump on their backs forever as a result, is beyond the realms of paranoid delusion. Seriously, see beyond the EA hate for once….

Back on topic, if it looked like people were playing old Valve games more than new EA games, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would look to pull the plug sooner rather than later. This would cost them bandwidth and I can’t see how they’d get these games making money unless they stuffed it to the gills with advertising. I’m sure they’d keep Steam, but that doesn’t mean they’d have to keep supporting Valve games if they weren’t somehow making money.

Either way we’d lose.

Putting your faith in EA to handle how your games are played is simply not an acceptable contingency plan. You are right, someone big would buy Steam up, but it would be the person with the most money looking to make the most money, not the person who wanted to continue or preserve Valve’s legacy and ethos.

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What KillahInstinct says seems to fit in with how I would see Valve doing it, provided they weren’t sucked in by the lure of a phat buyout.

PS It’s not exactly easy searching the forums, I hope to be able to find a link to it.

So you don’t actually lose the games you paid for. It just stops you from playing TF2 if you’ve been a dick.

Frankly if they wholesale ban peoples’ Steam accounts for abuses I’m all for it. Forfeiting access to your entire collection of games seems like a pretty good incentive to keep people from cheating online (and no one likes a cheater). Unless you’ve a penchant for using wallhacks, you shouldn’t be in any danger in my experience. Please no fictious ‘My Brother installed hacks on my machine’ scenarios.

Certainly there are plenty of games available on Steam that are available for less elsewhere. Valve don’t actually set the price of the 3rd party games available through Steam though, that’s something decided upon by the publishers. If they choose to mark it up higher than it’s available elsewhere, they’ve only themselves to blame when they see less sales. Steam is merely an option for purchasing 3rd party games, it isn’t a requisite.

Any more fight left in the tank, or are you just going to repeat the same one legged indian ‘what ifs’ that come up whenever (Grr, Boo, Hiss!!) Steam and Valve gets a mention in the press? Or perhaps you’ll surprise us and comment on the actual Steamworks toolset itself? Good idea? Bad idea? Potential to save the PC platform in the face of insurmountable gaming piracy? Perhaps elaborate on the whys and wherefores of that subject?

Valve has a “zero-tolerance policy for any violations of the Steam Subscriber Agreement and Online Code of Conduct.” How many other games have such a draconian system? How many users actually read the Subscriber Agreement and Code of Conduct? And even if a certain game used an equally draconian DRM scheme, it would only effect said game. With Steam, all games your purchase through it are subject to Valve’s DRM.

And I made a mistake: the Adobe example is different. You can purchase most Steam games in-store, thereby avoiding the entire system. No such luck with Adobe Creative Suite.

My evaluation is simple: retail games often cost less than their Steam counterparts and aren’t tied into one system with one point of failure. Buying games over Steam entails paying more money for less control over your investments.

By purchasing all of your games through Steam, you have one point of failure. If I bought Sid’s Railroads! and UTIII separately in store, for example, one couldn’t revoke permission to access the other. But if I bought both of those games through Steam, and my account goes poof, then they’re both disabled.

And you’re right: it’s no different than Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft’s DRM’d mp3s. I fail to see how the makes it fine, though.

Valve own a whole bunch of profitable and valuable IPs with a proven track record of success, and a software distribution system that reaches an unprecedented number of gamers. even if they were to go tits up over night without warning, someone (EA , Activision, Ubisoft, Vivendi even) would buy them up in an instant. Let’s say EA bought them (the most likely), do you think it’s realistic to envisage that EA would shut down Steam wholesale and alienate 15 million gamers in the process? Or do you think they’d build upon it? It’s a delivery system that works and works well, both for games and patches. As long as whomever owns Steam offers up support for older OS systems the white elephant argument is moot.