alt Hacker Newsultimately it means that all of the games in your library will stop working as soon as your computer has been offline for whatever length of time steam feels is "too long". I recommend getting a cracked copy of every game in your library to make sure that you will still have access to what you paid for if steam shuts down or you lose your internet connection.
Well, the Steamworks DRM simply poses no threat: a skiddie can crack that one. There are tools that can do it automatically. For stuff that depends on the Steam API, you can probably keep a copy of one of the popular emulators; normally it's enough to drop them next to the EXE. If Valve disappeared tomorrow, I could go into my steam apps folder and fix the problem immediately.
Having to crack things at all just to play them is bad. But, if it's easy to do it yourself, it is still better than going the route of downloading stuff from dubious sources. There's a whole ecosystem you have to understand to know what you can trust with piracy and not everyone knows where to look.
For the ticketing system, it's kind of a non-issue because that's a server-side mechanism. If a game requires that, it requires a server and won't work offline at all anyway.
For Denuvo, SecuROM, Themida, VMProtect and others... Yes, that stuff is an actual threat, but Valve doesn't make people use those. (Valve also doesn't make people use Steamworks for DRM either, and there are in fact games in my library whose Steam depots are free of any DRM at all and happily run outside of Steam with no Steam needed.)