I've seen stuff like ArcGIS on torrent sites the last time I checked. Dunno about Mnova.
Sidenote: their licenses are crazy complicated. I really wish there were just FOSS alternatives to everything. I know there's QGIS/GRASS GIS for ArcGIS, R for S (or is it the other way around? I forgot), MuseScore for Sibelius/Finale/etc., and so on. And also LibreOffice for MS Office of course. But I think some academic/professional software is just so niche and/or has institutional players (like companies, governments, and universities) that are so committed to it that it can be hard to get people to change.
So thanks to not having signed in for a couple months, I actually still had notifications from the last time I chatted about this, and here's the information someone else found when they looked into it.
In summary, this "policy" is at best someone (maybe even GabeN) stating back in 2009 and 2013 that games will still be (somehow) made available to customers if Steam shuts down.
As far as I know (please correct me if I'm wrong), there's nothing in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that obligates Steam/Valve to do it. And even if there were, there's nothing saying they can't just update the SSA to remove such a term.
Furthermore, even if Valve wants to do this if Steam ever shuts down, considering Steam's size I'd say it's less likely to be shut down and more likely to just get sold off if Valve ever does become insolvent, and the new owner of Steam can't be held to this promise anyway.
So, while it'd definitely be good if this were the case, this seems to be more wishful than written-in-stone.
Do you happen to know how well this works for old Windows games? We're talking about random indie things that run in little windows and are native to like Win98. A good lotta old doujin games are like this.
This was the case for me, to some extent, for some time. But then, the more I used of Steam, the more I realized there are a variety of issues, ranging from minor inconveniences like having to deal with the Steam client (and its interface and footprint) to being at risk of losing access to all of my Steam games due to losing access to the account for a variety of possible reasons (some of which could happen even if I didn't do anything wrong on my end).
These days, if I buy, I buy DRM-free. That's an arrangement where publishers/developers properly respect customers. If it's not available DRM-free, it's ethically justifiable to pirate.
I can agree that Valve has done some good things, such as making digital distribution go big, making indie games viable, and doing a lot to advance gaming on Linux.
But I'd also argue that that doesn't obligate me to spend money to patronize them, particularly when I can get a better (by virtue of being DRM-free) product elsewhere.
Fundamentally I don't really know how it'd be viable to truly "own" a specific copy of something, when it's always possible to make infinitely many copies of it. Any such "ownership" is at best essentially just conceptual, aside from perhaps the legal right to annoy other people about the copies they are in possession of.
So instead my personal take is that I'd rather everything just be offered DRM-free. I don't necessarily need transferable ownership as much as I just need proper and guaranteed access under my own control after I purchase the product.
Sidenote: I tried getting something off APKPure the other day and it only came in the form of XAPK files. Do you know how to get the APK out of them? (A cursory check suggests that XAPK might be a proprietary thing made by APKPure that only works with their own APKPure app, which feels pretty dirty to me...)
Still something that's merely word-of-mouth promise, not in any sort of legal documentation, and easily ignored if Valve does go down or change ownership. And that's assuming the information is still current, which itself is questionable.
(Not your fault; I don't mean to sound like I'm arguing with you.)
The Steam client (which, as we recall, is not optional, unlike e.g. GOG Galaxy) is gradually becoming bloatier in terms of technical concerns (due to moving to a browser-based engine), less accessible (due to that move breaking keyboard usability to do things like navigate through the game selection and launch them), and also bloatier in terms of features (a great example is the What's New shelf, but more generally, the interface prioritizes looking pretty than being responsive or data-dense with metadata about one's games).
On top of that, in recent years Steam basically shut off a way to access older versions of games (using a depot downloader). This is on top of Steam generally making avoiding game updates to be a pain anyway. (Yes, updates are often good things, but sometimes it's useful to have an older version, for a variety of reasons.)
As icing on the cake, if you try to suggest any of these features on the forum, be prepared for forum regulars to endlessly argue your thread into the ground, telling you why your idea is oh so wrong for Steam and how you should not have the right to play games you bought unless you do so in and only in the ways expressly authorized by the publishers who control all rights forever and always with zero recourse to you if anything goes wrong such as an errant update that breaks functionality.
I do wonder how pirated games can somehow stop working after a while.
I'm guessing there's some sort of anti-piracy thing that hasn't quite been fully removed.
I had this experience with one game which was known to have Denuvo; a newer crack fixed it.
If you have to crack the DRM, it's not DRM-free anymore.
The ones that are copy-and-paste-the-files-and-run-them, sure. But just because DRM is easy to crack doesn't mean it's not DRM.
(The one exceptions might be those super old forms of DRM which basically just need the manual and that's it. Sometimes, those were actually done in creative ways that made narrative sense in the game, too. So those are like, obsolete DRM that's auto-circumvented.)
For a while, Recettear and Chantelise were sold on GOG, but I don't think the Steam versions ever stopped using Steam DRM. But the GOG versions appeared a good long while after the Steam releases.
Also some older Ys games had DRM when they first appeared on Steam, but I don't remember whether the DRM was patched out by the time they were sold elsewhere (on GOG and formerly on GamersGate). I do know that pretty much all the games developed by Falcom are available DRM-free these days, and I know those that are published by XSEED are the same versions on GOG and Steam. Whether this is the case for the games published by other publishers (NISA, Aksys, and Mastiff) I'm not sure yet. A likely candidate worth checking in this regard is Gurumin. It's on GOG, and it's old, and it was published by someone other than XSEED (specifically, Mastiff); I vaguely remember Gurumin on Steam being unable to start without Steam.
Steam can definitely remove your access to games in your account. Though, to be fair, it generally doesn't, as it has little incentive to do so (outside of such cases as credit card chargebacks). There are a few cases though.
(Note of course that games delisted from sale in the store are generally not removed from accounts.)
To be fair, other stores certainly could too. But something like GOG is limited in what it can do, if you've been properly backing up your files, since you can still access your own offline installers even if you completely lose access to your account.
That said, as far as dangers to your Steam account go, I'd say that individual games getting removed is probably less likely than one of the following:
you losing access due to not being able to login for whatever reason (e.g. forgot your stuff and also lost your phone but you had Steam's 2FA going so you can't login)
getting your account stolen by a hijacker (which there are TONS and there have been for years due to the profitability of virtual item fraud and account fraud and the synergies between these two activities). If Steam screws up their side of things, this might even happen through no fault of your own -- for example, a bunch of people got hijacked several years ago when hijackers discovered that Steam's password recovery page would accept a blank input.
having your account banned for whatever reason. Probably less likely if you're well-behaved and don't cheat and don't talk about piracy on Steam, etc., but it's worth noting that this could happen. Also, if you dabble in cheats and your account gets VAC banned, I'd imagine that having to use a new account ends up being kinda similar to being banned from your old one, due to the hassle of having to switch accounts.
There's an old story about Gabe Newell saying that if Steam ever shuts down Valve will make sure players are able to access their games, but there's a few problems with this:
It's not actually in the Steam Subscriber Agreement.
This is old info anyway.
Given how big Steam is, it's more likely to be sold off than to go dark if Valve finds itself in financial trouble. And even if GabeN has truly promised this, the new owners of Steam are not beholden to such a promise.
As for Steam emulators, like SmartSteamEmu, I'm pretty sure they're not allowed but Valve just largely turns a blind eye to them and will do so unless they become a very significant issue in some way.
Never used Goodreads before myself but Bookwyrm seems really cool.