> And what if Steam went belly-up? Would I lose everything I paid for? What if a game was removed and I lost access to it? What if the internet was slow?
Honestly? If that were to happen - just pirate it. Everything (well, almost) that's on Steam is also readily and easily available on the seven seas, if you know where to look.
Sure, that wouldn't be fair to you, but from a purely practical point of view you'd be able to access your games if Steam went belly-up, and still "own" them. (Although perhaps not legally, depending on where you live.)
I buy my games on Steam because it's convenient, to support the devs, and to support Valve's investment in Linux. But otherwise I wouldn't blink twice before pirating if I were, say, screwed over by Steam or by a game publisher.
I forget where I saw it but well over half of all pirated software has some sort of malware on board. I'm no longer a poor college student. I cannot afford to risk my bank / brokerage accounts and credit cards for the sake of saving $60 on a game.
The real question is, in a world of Wine/Proton, Linux emulating the Windows API, and offline games (because the company running the servers would likely be dead then too), can you sandbox a game enough to not care whether it has some old malware or not.
I wouldn't do my banking on that computer, but a dedicated gaming computer, where each malware can only see the files of its own host game and has no networking -- that might just be good enough.
Honestly? If that were to happen - just pirate it. Everything (well, almost) that's on Steam is also readily and easily available on the seven seas, if you know where to look.
Sure, that wouldn't be fair to you, but from a purely practical point of view you'd be able to access your games if Steam went belly-up, and still "own" them. (Although perhaps not legally, depending on where you live.)
I buy my games on Steam because it's convenient, to support the devs, and to support Valve's investment in Linux. But otherwise I wouldn't blink twice before pirating if I were, say, screwed over by Steam or by a game publisher.