It isn't fair to discredit what Valve is building on the principle that it isn't free and open. Steam is a walled garden and is adored, for the most part anyway, by its users.
I believe Valve promised that they would just unlock and unDRM all of their games in such an event so that you can just install all of your Steam games straight on your PC without going through Steam.
How that would work if you were running actual Steam hardware on the other hand.
> How that would work if you were running actual Steam hardware on the other hand.
1. A hypothetical Steam Box or Valve-branded computer is extremely likely to be based off of COTS PC hardware, so there would not be a significant technical barrier to running games purchased on those platforms on a regular PC.
2. Steam already lets you buy a game once on Windows and play it on any Mac you own -- ie, they're not considered separate versions -- and Valve, at least, is extremely unlikely to stop developing for regular PCs, so you'd probably be easily able to load up any PC you have lying around with your Steam Box games in a worst case scenario.
Yes, you could probably run the games on your PC.
What I mean though , is if you bought a Steam branded console and ran all your games through that.
A Steam console if likely to be much more tightly integrated with their cloud stuff than a regular PC would and be reliant on valve for software updates so there might be more implications if they switched the cloud services off.
Steam isn't really a walled garden. Most of the titles on steam are things you can quite happily buy independently and install yourself. Steam won't stop you. Hell, I sometimes buy cheaper games on a competing service (like GMG) and Steam will still quite happily take on the license key from that purchase when I ask it to.
