@ BeenPlayingSinceRTW

You make some good points.

...so since everyone else is doing it it must be good? You're not serious are you?
Yes I am. Games companies are businesses. They are more often that not run by businessman as well as game developers. They have people who have been trained and are paid to make the company money. And that usually means that if enough companies are doing something there must be some advantage to it.

I'm not saying Steam is good because it is popular. I'm saying it is popular because it is good. When it first appeared Steam was an experiment that no one had to use. Now it has grown and is used by many millions of people, that doesn't happen to products with fundemental flaws.

Yes, Steam has it's problems. Pretty much everything does. Steam works well for the majority of people and for the majority of the time.

You can quote examples of people who have had a lot of problems with it, but there are also many people who have had no problems (myself included.)

This isn't really something I want to make a detailed argument for really. I'm not a Steam employee, and I'm not a representative of CA either, so I don't have a reason to defend either company's business decisions.

My point really is that Steam isn't all that bad, and it shouldn't be a reason to not purchase the game unless you have some kind of serious technical reason not to (for instance no internet connection).