GOG has reportedly cut dozens of jobs recently. Here are new details about the situation at CD Projekt’s subsidiary and the shortcomings of its business strategy.
But the APIs are public, so they can be reimplemented in open source. There just hasn’t been any reason for it since currently that would only be used for piracy (in fact some “cracked” games have a mockup of the steam API that just returns the expected things as if it had contacted the servers). But the moment steam goes away I give it a couple of weeks until there’s a GitHub implementing most of the basic stuff.
Gabe Newell has promised that if Steam goes down you won’t lose your library, but we only have his word as assurance.
No doubt the corporate drones that take over after his death will shit all over his legacy.
It’s one of my biggest fears, but I guess there’s always piracy especially for old games.
Gabe Newell is much more likely to go down before steam does. his words mean nothing for the future.
Do you have a source for this? People like to repeat this rumour but I’ve never found out where he promises anything like that.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170521113731/http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=16095809&postcount=7
There’s this, the original comment lost to time, but a link to an alleged direct quote from GabeN.
In addition to that forum archive, here’s a Steam support response via Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam_support_what_happens_to_my_games_if/
Anything that uses steam apis and services won’t work without steam and steam offers a lot of that to game devs
But the APIs are public, so they can be reimplemented in open source. There just hasn’t been any reason for it since currently that would only be used for piracy (in fact some “cracked” games have a mockup of the steam API that just returns the expected things as if it had contacted the servers). But the moment steam goes away I give it a couple of weeks until there’s a GitHub implementing most of the basic stuff.
And have been since years: https://mr_goldberg.gitlab.io/goldberg_emulator/