Steam now explicitly states you don’t own the digital games you’re buying.

Yes, but people (including me) always assumed oh whenever steam goes down they will let us atleast give a way to download the games to be used offline, and people could discuss if we owned them or not, but Valve kinda really put an whole end to the discussion this way.

As long as steam exists i don't think they would mess with removed games, that they will still let us download and play them, it's more the question what if, if steam ever does go down and what then? The same seems to get applied to anything digital, where stores might not be so open to let us still download what we bought after it got removed.

Yeah, i am pretty "in the scene" and i got 12000 games on steam, but i think about 70% no warez group ever bothered with getting those games released (and yes a majority could be considered shovelware and not even worth it to some, but also decent games.
Unlike with Desura when that went down they always still had installers you could download (and i had 1000+ games) and i downloaded everything including screenshots (to easily see what sort of game it was).

People say everything is available on the internet, well not really, how many games even 10-15 year old (Like Simon the Sorcerer 4/5, Goblins 4 are hard to get. Or that one show from the seventies or eighties or even nineties you can't watch anymore.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam

I believe the amount isn't very large but i could be wrong.

There's still a technical and legal difference between ownage and possession and there might still be some form of license agreement involved when buying some of these, but in video game practice, it is basically the same as if you had bought a physical copy, yes. I don't know, if Steam shows a different text, when buying one of these.

You don't. In some sense you were never able to. Even if you had physical medium without any protections.

GOG, you can always keep the files drm free on your drive.

One of the last physical games I bought required you to put the disc in to run a program to activate a key in the box which then generated a second key for you to activate in Steam. It was bizarre.

It wasn't also 100% clear, i seen discussions here, like oh if steam ever goes down, they wont take away our games, let us download them before that happens, but basically this would end any discussions there with a clear statement.

In the back of our minds most people did already know, some just didn't really want to believe it yet.

Okay i only saw the german store thread, i am guessing since it's pretty much the same, i will close this.