This is really nice. Valve does everything very intelligently and their products are always top notch. Steam is definitely the wave of the future in gaming and maybe all media in general.

It certainly is the best way to fight PC piracy.

Wow that is pretty cool! I like the who steam idea of registering games then being able to ditch the CD. Or hell if i could get 1meg down if I purchased a new game I would not even mind just getting the manual in the box with a CD key..

I'm critical of Valve when they mess up, but this is a good move. Steam used to be an atrocity, but not anymore. It keeps getting better and better, and I wouldn't mind getting all my games via Steam. Now someone needs to put pressure on the developers to use smaller boxes and reduce waste, or better yet, eliminate boxes altogether.

Of course, the days of well-made and entertaining manuals seems to be over.

Bah, kids these days! You are the reason we can't have LP album art anymore either!

Oh yeah, get off my yard!!!

Wow, how far has the community's view of Steam come since the early days? I was one of those lucky folks that never had any troubles with Steam, so I've loved it from day 1. Valve seems to have the nice ability to look forward, to see what might be coming down the road, both for business and games. Now, if only they could get rid of their load times....

Yeah, I didn't have problems w/ Steam either, but i remember making the conscious decision to buy HL2 on disk because I didn't trust it. Their internal QA is very high, as is their commitment to testing and fixing issues. The load times don't really bother me that much, especially since the DRM on my copy of the Witcher fails one out of every 3 times I fire it up, and I've got the bloody original DVD in my drive.

Can you gift a game from your old account to your new account? I'm not sure how the gifting process actually works, I'm just thinking out loud.

Well Boo-urns to that, although I see the rationale for the restriction.

Thats nice indeed.

For "Games for Windows", if MS was smart, they would just make a deal with Valve at this point, to smash in a Windows Logo somewhere and call it a day I guess.

I think he misspelled CD. They used to put music on CDs back in the '70s.

I'll echo the wierdness, but I AM getting excited about it. I guess I'm just going to fall short of Stallman's standards. I'm OK with not being able to share what I own. What Steam does is make it *more* convenient for me to use their product rather than less. Being able to access my library from any computer is a plus. Perhaps it is too easy a compromise, but I'm willing to give up the right of first sale for that.

Screw that gimme my huge manuals and fictional story supplements (i.e Starsiege and Tribes). I'm getting light on bathroom reading material. I don't see the reason for a box and what not if you are just putting a 2 page manual and a disc inside. But for the very few that want to give you the full tilt I welcome big boxes and full size 100 page manuals.

I'm lookin at you Fallout 3!!!

MS not only dropped the ball, they threw it out the window. I doubt they will ever get any real handhold after what Valve just pulled. Really, the only competitor I'd figure that is worth anything is Gamespy, who has been doing this for a long time and remains pretty well established. I'd like to see how they respond, if at all.