Its not all that unlikely that Steam could at some point become a publicly traded company. Gabe builds up the service, then sells it to make millions. If it goes public, it's the share holders who would dictate the business plan. A very different situation than the current privately owned one. Even in this current situation there are pressures that could conceivably cause Steam to recoup rising costs by adding fees for some services. MP hosting tops the list. In that scenario you'd buy a game and be able to play single player games; but to play multi-player, using Steams servers, you'd have to pay a small monthly fee. As Steam grows, their need for server space grows. As energy costs rise, Steams server costs rise exponentially. Its reasonable to wonder how Steam will profitably deal with this.
A scarier possibility, that is a very real concern on the minds of many... including respected
tech gurus, some members of the US Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, is
Net Neutrality. Look it up! It's important! Already the ISP comcast, has throttled network access to bit torrent sites. They justify this by saying that these services are bandwidth hogs that contribute to network congestion. They say they are doing their customers a service by unclogging some of this congestion by throttling access to the big bandwidth hogs. compost recently won their case against the FCC and there is currently nothing to stop them from throttling other bandwidth heavy services... services like Steam. And Steam is very much a bandwidth hog which could very well be targeted by ISP's who have over reached the ability of their infrastructure to handle this increasing traffic. They've already throttled popular bit torrent services. And they own monopolies over many regions broadband service. I can't say that angry gamers would impact comcasts decision to balcklist Steam as bandwidth hog in need of throttling.
Another possibility, and one that I personally may be experiencing, is that your ISP downgrades your service at peak times if you've been tagged as a consumer of bandwidth hogging services. Your ISP can currently slow your download speeds to compensate. I watch movies and TV exclusively online. I dropped com
post cable entirely. This is a threat to my ISP's com
blastit cable service. Netflix instant watch, Hulu, TV Network sites, PBS Online, YouTube, etc are my friends. There are two other users on this network, and they occasionally stream Netflix movies via the Roku device. From April 6th, 2010
the day the courts ruled in comcasts favor, to this day, our net connection is slower than dial-up speeds during peak times. Nearly every morning from around 4am PCT to sometime after 9am, the net is nearly unusable. I am experiencing this slow down right now. YouTube videos won't play. Previewing this post takes many minutes. Our computers, the Roku, router, and our incoming line are working fine. It is the signal from comcast which is faulty. The evidence points to our ISP downgrading our service during peak times. I copy/paste a post into notepad before submitting since the page often times out and I'd lose the post.
My best guess as to why comcast would be downgrading our connection, is that we use a bandwidth heavy service such as NetFlix. As congestion grows worse, cloud computing increases, and net TV grows more popular; ISP's infrastructure becomes increasingly inadequate to handle the demand. More and more sites will be added to the "slow this user" list if Net Neutrality is lost. This is just one of the reasons I do not want to buy a game that is married to net access. You may not put value into this concern, and you may not have concerns over Net Neutrality; but I and others do. And I do see this as being just one of many legitimate reasons for not wanting a gate keeper between and my games. When I lose the net, thats when I want to be playing my games the most. If I drop the net altogether, I want to be able to play my games. With no net, and with Steams current methods; I lose the game if I reformat my hard drive or upgrade to a new machine.