they said you could play your games but didnt mention online gaming

I'm curious about the measures as well, we may have access to single player, but what about multiplayer?

I'm not so worried about authentication, my main concern would be how you'd get your digital copies if you needed to without any physical media.  Is Steam going to keep download servers up or are they going to rely on torrents lol?  Going to be a scary day when people need to backup 1TB of Steam games for perpetuity knowing its going to be a not-so-fun experience trying to download them later if they have to.  /hugs my physical copies of all non-Steam games.

As for multiplayer, I'd say any game that relies on Steam's servers for authentication will cease to work in multiplayer.

it is like saying what will happen to my corvette when earth runs out of oil? 

when steam dies it is because PC gaming is over.  you won't be playing/authenticating/downloading/updating anything.

steam has become the foundation for the whole dang thing like it or not.
(I love steam personally)

rblaes_99

it is like saying what will happen to my corvette when earth runs out of oil? 

when steam dies it is because PC gaming is over.  you won't be playing/authenticating/downloading/updating anything.

steam has become the foundation for the whole dang thing like it or not.
(I love steam personally)

Idk, I could see a scenario where Steam diminishes greatly, it would just take 3-4 of the major publishers partnering up and creating their own online subscription-based service and keeping their game catalogs exclusive.  You may think there's no way that would ever happen, but if you read recent comments from Activision's Bobby Kotick you'll see there's already those kind of plans in the works.
 
Imagine say....EA, Activision, THQ, Ubisoft and Rockstar partnering up to create their own online gaming service, similar to Steam and keeping their titles exclusive, similar to Valve with their own titles.  If push came to shove what are you going to choose?  EA and Ubisoft already have the beginnings of these web portals and overall more and more publishers are making inroads here.  Activision and Blizzard already have B.net and all indications are B.net 2.0 is moving in this direction as well.  Steam certainly has a huge lead in this regard but to say they're invulnerable or immune to market changes barring a catastrophic collapse of the PC Gaming market would be a bit premature imo.

this is an interesting arguement.

I have a battlenet account, an impulse account, an EA download manager,  and a direct2drive account and by far my two (2) steam accounts have been invested in much much more.  

I think Steam has the best overall package.  but you are right, a proprietary system is the way steam got started in the first place with half-life 2 if I recall.

Ya there's no doubt Steam is the most widespread and adopted service by far but if we go back in time to ~2003 people HATED Steam and the fact Valve required you to jump through hoops and register/validate your game.  Also, for the most part, if you didn't play any Valve games, you didn't need Steam.

The situation changed drastically however when other publishers started offering their games and catalogs on Steam.  Some of the bigger names only recently embraced Steam (for numerous financial reasons I'm sure), like EA and Rockstar for example only made the shift as recently as 2008 I believe.  In all cases its been kind of a big deal when one of them made the move and has contributed greatly to Steam's explosive growth over the last few years.

So now really Steam's greatest asset is its installed user-base, approximately 25 million, but that user-base still relies on content, the majority of which still comes from other publishers.  If those publishers walked with their catalogs I don't think Steam would keep its position of market dominance on the strength of Valve's titles alone. 

As you hinted at, it would certainly be a greater inconvenience for the end-user having to set-up multiple accounts for multiple services all over the place, but I think this is the reality we're moving towards as more and more of these publishers/developers want a piece of this lucrative digital distribution and subscription-based pie.

rblaes_99

it is like saying what will happen to my corvette when earth runs out of oil? 

when steam dies it is because PC gaming is over.  you won't be playing/authenticating/downloading/updating anything.

steam has become the foundation for the whole dang thing like it or not.
(I love steam personally)

I love steam as well, just because its easier to backup my whole collection of games in the steamapps folder to my 1TB external hardrive, way easier then having to install each game by disk, manually update them and reconfigure my settings all the time when I do system upgrades, change hardrives, and OS reloads.

I'm slowly trying to move all my old retail games over to steam for that reason, I don't mind buying the game twice just for that convenience.

agreed. 

I vividly recall a good friend taking his preordered copy of HL2 back to microcenter and demanding (with a red face) a full refund when he learned he could not install the game without first installing steam (which he insisted was akin to a virus).... 

it is interesting to see how the entire industry has developed in the last 5-7 years.

Additionally, It is also troubling to see the majority of games moving to the micro-transaction / paid DLC models as well for every stupid little thing.  The industry greed will be what kills it ultimately. 

I recently read an article from a developer that basicly said (not verbatim)  "we don't want to sell you a game for $50 and be done, we want to sell you a game for $50, and then sell you content to add to it making it a $200 game".   I find this trend most troubling.

I'm not worried about Valve going under... but they've been telling us this for like... ever. :P