@LMN8R
Ok, while I did not mention Empire: Total War by name I would have thought the mention of Creative Assembly would have been a tip off. You apparently thought I was talking about DoW2, which I was not.
Steam is normally very fast for downloads, but yesterday it was painful for anyone, anywhere in the world trying to buy and download Empire: Total War from Steam. In my case it ended up taking @ 16 hours. This was after having pre-purchased the game over two weeks before release.
And why couldn't I just pop around and buy it retail? Because as mentioned, I had a pre-purchase it. Just to cancel that requires sending in a form to Valve, and waiting a few days for a response from their Customer Service. But once you start to download, it is too late; no refunds. The catch is that I couldn't have known that the DL rate was going to suck so bad before I started the DL, could I? I mean, Steam is *normally* rather good.
The failure on Steam and Creative Assembly, as I mentioned in my OP, is that they disallowed any preloads. So on release day there were thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of people trying to DL the game from the same servers at the same time. This would have been fair if they thought to warn people, but they didn't so instead it made a lot of people mad. But hey, don't believe me. Just check out the forum on Steam, or over on GamesFAQ and see how many threads start with 'how fast can you download' 'steam sucks' 'false advertising about preloads' and so on.