Personally, I feel a lot safer having a physical item in my possession rather than a license to electronic data over steam. I rebuilt my computer once & lost the data for my steam account.
I agree. I rebuild (or reformat) my machines contantly. I've bought software before that had to be installed off the net, and I've always had to call them up to get them to let me download more copies.
I'm against Steam anyway. They promise cheaper games and all that bullshit, but what really will happen is that games will merely be more expensive to have physically and the same price as they should have been for the Steam version.
What Steam really offers Valve is more
direct profits. Publishers are like leeches; they'll suck the profits as mnuch as they can, and many are slow to pay the developers their half.
Steam can let Valve cut out the middle-man. No stocking fees, CD burning fees, etc for whoever orders it over Steam. They keep a larger profit.
This problem has been going on forever, and Valve is working on a solution. Unfortunately, I don't feel like dedicating my DSL connection to a single-player game. And I certainly don't like the idea of owning the "rights to download and play a game" instead of "owning a CD with the whole game on it."
Pentium 4 3.06 GHz w/ Hyperthreading & 533 MHz FSB
1024MB PC2700 Crucial RAM
ATI Radeon 9800XT
Windows XP Pro
"Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you."
-Fry, Futurama