Services like Steam are supposed to eliminate the need for physical discs, since copies of our games are available in the cloud. However, we know very well that Steam is not eternal, and that some titles demand a lot of time to download. That's when local backups come into play, and if you want to create boxes for them with the corresponding art, the Steam Game Covers portal has everything you need.
One of the big questions behind every distribution service is what will happen to users' games once they stop working. For now, there is absolutely no indication that systems like Steam and Origin will disappear... but the possibility, however remote, is there. The precedents we have seen so far are rather poor. Names like Microsoft and Electronic Arts have 'retired' games without the possibility of running them offline, and all the petitions to create a legal exception that allows their modification have been denied. Servers disappear, games stop working, and the user is left without a local copy... which is equivalent to throwing money down the drain. Steam does not completely escape this situation, since its DRM functions are well known, but the difference is that it allows local backups of games, very useful to save time in a reinstallation process, and of course, to preserve them.
With that idea in mind, Mark Del Rio has shaped Steam Game Covers, a portal that, as its name reveals, offers digitized covers for creating boxes for our games on Steam. If an official box exists, contributors can scan a version adjusted to the appropriate size and upload it to the server. Otherwise, those with a little skill in Photoshop or other editors have the possibility of creating equivalent art. Steam Game Covers not only offers material for optical disc boxes, but also for their surface. Some of the covers are extraordinary, while others leave much to be desired, but the best examples are dedicated to popular games, such as Borderlands 2, Dishonored, and of course, all Valve games.
The site offers an option to register, but if you're only looking for isolated images, the truth is you don't need to do so. It's also necessary to recognize that the availability of covers is a bit irregular. Some games have more than one option, while others only offer boxes for DVDs, or don't even appear in the database. I imagine that at this point the average Steam library is too large to back up every game, but if you want to have your favorites close, it's not bad for them to have their own boxes.
