LogFAQs > #903229377

adjl posted...

These days, most new games require day one patches to work anyway, even when purchased physically. You're going to be very hard-pressed to keep your console offline forever, and once it's online, it wouldn't take long at all to render it unable to read your copy. Furthermore, if you're issued a legal order to stop using the license, continuing to use it would open you up to lawsuits regardless of whether or not they can actually deactivate your game.

Not trying to pick sides here, but even in the remote possibility of an update making the game stop working, you can still:

1. Not update the game, given that you found out it will make it stop working from other people;
2. Clean up the HD of the console and it will work again, but without the possible updates that you had before (unless there is some external manual way to install those, I wouldn't be surprised if there was)

Meanwhile Steam can just shutdown one day and, since the client often refuses to work offline (at least for me), users would be screwed. Of course, it would be stupid and I doubt it'll ever happen, but it's possible and there would be nothing to be done about it.