Agreed. I'm really hoping that EA sees this in BF3 PC sales and reverses direction. I refuse to be shoehorned into keeping around a different gaming client, if EA pulls their titles then I'm not buying EA on PC.

I don't even have a problem with Origins as a service, but I don't trust EA to keep putting effort into it once they get the marketshare. I trust Valve to do so because they're doing it, right now, as we speak. They even took time out to breathe new life into Mac gaming, a move that earned tons of respect from me.

Using EA's store supports a trend of individual publisher stores and a situation where I have 10 different clients from 10 different companies, something that I am strongly against. It's true that Valve is a publisher as well, but the fact of the matter is they got there first and have proven themselves trustworthy. EA did neither and is now trying to lure us into their gingerbread house with candy and a fake smile. I just don't trust it.

I completely agree with you about the trust issue, but if nothing else comes of this I do hope it forces Valve to reconsider their stance on in-game purchases. EA is completely in the right about that, as much as I hate to agree with them.

> I have that game for life

Not for life, but rather for the life of Steam as a platform. I don't see Valve going away anytime soon, but you never know...

Rumor has it that if Valve went under and Steam was shut down, they'd release a patch to allow their games to continue to function.

But how could you back the games up or move them to another computer?

Same way that you do it now - copy the relevant files out of ~/Steam/steamapps/ to wherever you need. I've gotten around re-downloading huge games because everything you need is in there (when I've already done it once before on a different machine, or when I'm getting a game a local friend of mine already downloaded). The only thing stopping you from playing it is the DRM on the executable, but the mythical Steam-is-dead-here-you-go-patch will solve that.

Torrents. And I bet it would be legal because Valve would do something like releasing the games for free just before they tanked. I'm not so sure about some of the other labels that exist on Steam, though.

Steam supports generating backup discs and images. They could release a way of using them without requiring online verification.

That's probably a lot longer than my own life expectancy.

I would only think in those terms if I could get to live forever.