I pray the Steam Machine becomes a competitive console.

[Barkley]

torok said:

Barkley said:

You don't have to be online to play steam games.....

It allows you to be offline for an ammount of time (30 days, if I'm remebering it right). It's the Steam offline mode. However, if the servers were turned down, the games would eventually stop working.

According to valve there is no time limit on offline mode - http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/864969953572102601/#c864969953730401285

It's unimaginable at the moment that steam could ever go under with it's current monopoly on pc gaming. Even if the unthinkable happened they would just be bought out. If for whatever reason they had to cease business and no one else would take up the reigns then I'm sure they would disable the DRM which is built into the steam dll files not the games themselves so disabling it across the entire library would be a simple task.