Technology

I've got Unreal Tournament 3 (and all of the UT games) on steam. Those games haven't been available to purchase on steam for a long time now, not since the Epic games store started up.

I can still download and play those games from steam today. I can still play them with people who bought them on other storefronts.

Steam has been in the news a lot lately for "Anti-consumer" policies, like requiring their storefront games to be the same version as any other store front, forcing developers to sell DLC on Steam if that DLC is available anywhere else, forcing publisher to price their games the same on steam as they are anywhere else... And all those things are pro-consumer, I feel protected from shitty publishers because of the strong requirements Steam has to list items on their storefront.

Now, I will say that Steam, like any other digital storefront, has the opportunity to really fuck us over, and the protections from that was always the existence of physical media. Steam was built from the ground up to compete with owning physical copies of your games. Other digital storefronts have been built with the sole goal of competing with Steam. After physical media is dead, Steam will only have to compete with those other storefronts, and will only need to offer better services than the likes of Sony...who is deleting your purchases and keeping the money.