"Valve is not your friend, and Steam is not healthy for gaming"

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

I do hope people realize that when a game is on steam, it will be on steam forever... Keeping games on your servers cost money and keeping them on your servers forever cost even more so... Brick and Mortar stores never keep anything on their shelves forever cause of the competitive nature of shelve space but digital games will be on the platform forever unless something happens like with Alan Wake.

The trade off is that having a digital game on a server costs much less than having it on the shelve, at least relatively on the short term. On consoles, the serves will most likely go down eventually when people no longer use the system to buy digital games due to generations. On PC though, when you have something on steam, generations is no longer a thing so steam has to keep the game on their servers for essentially forever. And that makes it a double edged sword cause if the game does sell, then valve will make money but if the game doesn't sell, then it's just sitting there taking up space which could have gone to a different game.

Now Valve as well as all the other digital platforms make more than enough money for it to not matter but let's not act like keeping a digital game on the server has no cost to it while having a physical game on a store shelf has tons of cost to it. In reality, both have costs involved, just one has costs on the short term while the other has costs in the long term.