it is not really worth doing it, if companies want to take away the games they will do it.
i would wait to see how the whole stop killing games movement goes, then if it goes well, start with backing up online games where you spent money, then the singleplayer games.
some games i dont think will work even if you backup such as games with launchers, like ubisoft and origin. idk about steam, but i believe we will get a heads up from valve if they were to shutdown. gog is cool to backup, those games are like pdfs, already bundled with the necessary launcher and patches.

Never let Steam update games. 7 days to Die Alpha 19 was released 5 years ago.
The developers modified the game removing the cigarettes you could find in creative mode.
I miss my dang virtual cigarettes you could get for your character in creative mode.

Also never use a Fun Pimps game like 7 Days to Die. Who changes an alpha game 5 years later while working on new Alpha's? Absolute d icks. That's who.

I do not consider this urgent, when or if the time comes for Steam to shutdown, you will probably have enough time to save whatever you want, I don't think it will just suddenly be light-out randomly without us knowing.

I can tell you the way I personally do it. I back-up everything on my computer. I also do it more than just for games. I have thousands of hours of music I created and hundreds of hours of video and animation I created. As well as other stuff(art I created on my drawing pad, pictures, mods I created for games, etc.).

I use Macrium Reflect as my back-up software I use. I have it set to a day and time that is best for me for it to do an automatic back-up, where it does a back-up of everything. The back-ups go really fast though, because it only updates what changed since the last update, it doesn't re-do everything.

I back-up all game installers, all installed game folders, and all my other non-game data. The reason I back-up the game installers is so I have the original game installers backed up. I back-up the installed game folders because I have a lot of games and I'd rather not re-install them one by one should I ever lose them. Backing up the installed Steam games is the same idea, and I do play Steam games offline a lot. So like OP, I'm also an offline Steam user.

Most GOG games do not need to be installed to play, so only maybe 10 out of my 900 GOG games are installed on my computer. The rest I play directly from the folder. It keeps my Windows installation more free of clutter this way, which is how I personally like it.

I also have a Windows image set to where I have all my drivers installed expect my chipset and graphic card driver. Whenever I want to update my chipset and graphics card, I restore my Windows image to that point and install the newer drivers.

There's other things I do, like back-up saved game folder locations when they're on the Windows drive. But that's how I personally do it. I have like 400 terabytes of total space across all my hard drives. Once the initial back-up is set-up and done, the continuous back-ups are a breeze and fast. It gives me peace of mind and it just works. There's zero maintenance and I never have to think about it.

When it comes to worrying about Steam games and their updates, they'll give you a notice if they ever will shut down. The best way you could do it if you're worried about it, is to keep it in offline mode if that's how you do it, and then once in a while when you either buy a new game or just want to update, put it in online mode and update and download your new game, then put in offline mode when it's done. That won't mess up your games in anyway.

bubg and cod extractor are not worth keeping.

It's not something I would do. I can only play so many games a year, I rarely play them a second time, and even the biggest ones download pretty fast at 2Gbps. A game rarely costs more than a heavy night out, so if in the extremely unlikely event Steam goes kaput and there is no buyer, I would just rebuy games on another platform as and when I feel like playing them.

While there is nothing confirmed, GabeN (or someone from Valve) has made implications that in the event Valve/Steam is shut down, that Valve will work out a way for you to still be able to access your games.

Do we even have any way of knowing which of the games can work purely offline?

Originally posted by dgresevfan:

Do we even have any way of knowing which of the games can work purely offline?

My assumption is that game developers will put in the least amount of effort as possible. Offline versions of online games will likely be missing stuff or not be updated to be fully compatible with offline play. It will probably end with playerbase creating their own code to fix the offline version of the game.

The reason I think developers will be able to get away with not fully patching the game to work offline, is because we paid for the online version.

Originally posted by Noc:

I do not consider this urgent, when or if the time comes for Steam to shutdown, you will probably have enough time to save whatever you want, I don't think it will just suddenly be light-out randomly without us knowing.

My personal thoughts are that when the day comes that Steam shuts down, let's say they give two weeks or even a month notice. All of their servers will shut down due to the overload of everyone trying to download their games. Something to consider.

Originally posted by Nev Nev:

...

I back-up all game installers, all installed game folders, and all my other non-game data. The reason I back-up the game installers is so I have the original game installers backed up. I back-up the installed game folders because I have a lot of games and I'd rather not re-install them one by one should I ever lose them. Backing up the installed Steam games is the same idea, and I do play Steam games offline a lot. So like OP, I'm also an offline Steam user.

Thanks for everything you wrote. I think you have an excellent backup system there for everything. Drive imaging and incremental image backups are a very good way to go. I use Acronis True Image for that. What I'm currently doing though when it comes to my Steam and other games is instead of making a backup image to copy my games from one hard drive to the second hard drive (for redundancy) is I'm using a synchronisation program called FreeFileSync which mirrors the files from one drive to the other. It is very fast too. This way, I have two drives with exactly the same contents. If one drive fails, I can access my games without having to extract them from a backup image, then when I replace the failed drive, I can copy the files from the second drive to the new drive.

You mentioned you back up all game installers. Are you talking about GOG installers? Yeah, those are a must I think. GOG does update their installers for some games though, I found online there's a python script which checks for changes to the installers on GOG and lets you download them. I haven't tried it yet though. I don't think there are any installers for Steam games right? Steam just downloads all of the files needed to play the game and puts them in the game folder.

An example of why it's not a good idea for anyone to wait until news that a site is shutting down before downloading their content is Groupees.com. I had a number of DRM-free games, soundtracks, movies, etc. that I bought on there and I downloaded about half of them. Then late last year, they shut down for good. As far as I know, without notice. So it's a good idea for people who care about what they buy to download them sooner rather than later. Places like GOG, Humble Bundle, Indiegala, Amazon games, and any other place where you bought something and haven't downloaded it yet.

Archive anything you are even SLIGHTLY concerned about being lost. Be a hero.