People who write self-contradictory posts deserve a mild ad hominem.

So Steam is awesome because it eliminates physical media, but PS, keep your games backed up on physical media if you don't want to lose access to them? As finely sensible a post as your last, good sir.

Sure, if you're willing to use illegal methods and rely on the pirates, you'll be able to play your Steam games years from now without Steam. But, if you are so willing, you can play them without Steam right now.

And I, on the other hand, won't have to break the law to play my games.

Most of the used games I purchase cannot be bought new any more. Where is the loss here?

Next Week: Not every download is a lost sale.

Every download, uh, I mean, every resell is a lost sale. True story.

Everything lasts forever in Steam-land.

Ironically, assuming DD doesn't destroy the used market, when Steam kills all your old games, your only legal recourse will be to seek a used physical copy.

So, it's worth the effort of keeping physical media around in order to be able to replay them forever, but you are willing to give up the ability to replay them forever (by using steam) in order to avoid the effort.

Steam proponents are priceless.

Assume all piracy/lending/used sales are removed from the world by magic.

Game developer spends $10M making a game, but only one person buys it, and no-one else plays it. Game developer is still out $9,999,950.

Making a crap game: -$9,999,950
Realising that not every download/copy is a lost sale: Priceless

You my friend are the quintessential Steam user. You know it will screw you over eventually, but you just don't care, because not having to pick up a disk and put in a drive frees you of such a monumental burden.

I like standing on train tracks. I don't doubt that a train might come along in the future and possibly harm me. However, that isn't a problem right now.

Really? I thought the whole point of Steam was that games are licensed software, not physical products.

I've always thought that a never ending march towards smarter AI would go something like this:

The Past:
No real AI. Enemies know where you are at all times, and simply make a beeline for you. To the player, the enemies seems to always know where you are and make a beeline for you.

The Present:
The enemies are no longer allowed to know where you are. Instead, simple AI makes basic decisions about how to act when you walk right in front of it. To the player, the enemies seem stupid.

The Future:
The AI now has advanced heuristics which allow it to take prompts from the environment and knowledge of your probable goals to judge your probable location by using 50% of your CPU power, and use advanced physics engines and inverse kinematics to take a realistic route to get to you, using the other 50% of your CPU power. To the player, the enemies seems to always know where you are and make a beeline for you.

Not everyone is convinced that GPGPU is the best way of processing AI though. Bethesdaâ(TM)s Jean-Sylvere Simonet notes that "we might be able to take advantage of parallel architectures, but not for everything. You could probably speed up some individual parts of the decision process, such as replacing your AI search with a brute-force GPU approach, or running a pattern detection algorithm". However, Simonet also points out that "most AI processing is very sequential and usually requires a lot of data.

"For an NPC to decide on its next action, it will usually have to query the world for a tonne of information, and most of that information is conditional on a previous query result. For that reason, fewer processors that are more versatile, such as the SPEs in the PlayStation 3â(TM)s Cell chip, are ideal".

Power of Cell etc etc.

Unless you want your games to disappear eventually, you'll be keeping media of some kind around anyway. And having the media is hardly a pain in the neck, where is the difficulty is having something sitting on a shelf?
Sure, you can waste bandwidth downloading the same game again at a friends house, but I can just bring the media and install on as many machines as I like.

Steam brings a lot of convenience if peeling yourself out of your chair to pick up a disk and carry it all the way to the disk drive is such a herculean effort for you. Except in this most extreme of cases however, the inevitable loss of your games is a ridiculous price for this 'convenience'.

I wouldn't mind if DD didn't threaten physical distribution, how you handle your games is none of my business. But I, any many others, don't want to lose the ability to keep our physical copies and buy rather than rent our games to pander to the extreme laziness of the masses who will lose interest in those same games as soon as something new and shiny comes along.

Really? In the vast, vast majority of cases the most I've ever had to contend with is a CD check, which is easily fixed, and sometimes not even that, and no attempts to prevent me from selling games on.

Oh, they let you do they? Lucky you. Imagine getting permission from your overlords to install a game more than once...

That they have reached a point where things which was once taken for granted are now seen as selling points is quite an achievement indeed for Valve.

True, unfortunately.

But they are far from being the only fun games around.

Offline mode sometimes demands that you go online before working, defeating the purpose. And why should a single player game complain about your Internet connection anyway? They are just adding more hassle.

As for being as reasonable as they can, I find that hard to accept, when people have been more reasonable than this for the last, well, since the dawn of video games.

My purchases are 100% physical. The one game I play that cost me money where I have no disk is EVE, but with EVE you pay for the account, not the client that you download.

For me, the box and manual are part of the product. The best games often come with custom covers or special editions - look at Ico, which came in a cardboard case with art cards. These people actually gave a damn about the product.
Now we have people who don't want to do a physical version at all, who see it only as a means to make money, and DD as the most profitable method? They can keep their crap.

Nothing can outweigh a physical box and manual - there is no compensation for part of the product being absent.