alt Hacker News> All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now.
It all depends on where you buy your games of course; GOG will let you download DRM-free installers, but if Steam goes down, your libraries goes down with it. They have made a vague promise that they would prevent that if the company ever went out of business, but who knows if they will keep that promise.
Guarantees about playability went out the window the day free, easily-obtained updates came out on PC as much as consoles.
At least on the PC side, there's a vibrant piracy community.
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Realistically, if Steam closed down tomorrow, within 4-6 hours there'd be a megathread on Reddit explaining how to get the games running without Steam. Within 48 hours there'd be an auto-crack tool floating around on GitHub.
Steam for some reason gets a pass even though it normalized the use of DRM for PC games over 20 years ago.
If steam goes down you can play offline. They have a portable game console that doesn't need to be connected to play. They have big warnings on the store page of games that require online drm.
Steam has some backup feature. I do backups of my games. Compressed to slow HDD dedicated to backups. Faster to install than downloading again from network. Don't know though how much will that help
Also there is a vibrant retrogaming community, with lots of games much more interesting than yet another COD or FIFA.
Even if you get all of your games via Steam, provided you have them downloaded, you can still run them without Steam if you know where to look. Obviously GOG is far better in this regard, but preservation is not a concern on PC, outside of games that are reliant on a server.
Starting next generation when prices are going to be obscenely high, I'm really struggling to see why anyone should invest in a console as opposed to a (mini-)PC.