I am really excited, mostly because I have been avoiding several Ubisoft titles I want to play due to my drive not liking their Securom copy protection.

And holy crap, this is right off the heels of Atari joining. This may be a little bit of a high hope, but with Atari and Ubisoft joining despite having their own digital stores, and with John Riccitello seeming to breathing more fresh air into EA, I really hope they jump on board in the near future. I mean, if I could buy Spore, Dragon Age and Red Alert 3 over Steam, Valve would be getting all my PC gaming money, barring the odd European release like the Anno series, for the foreseeable future.

Steam is blazing a new trail.

One thing I love about this, from the perspective of being a Valve fan, is how awesome it must be for them, when they release a new game. Steam is the biggest source for online purchases, and will only get bigger as time goes on. When Ep. 3 (and possible packins) comes out, they own one of the three biggest sales outlets - talk about an advertising dream. It's like if GameStop were developing and releasing a game. Huge advantage.

I am all over getting IL-2.

I imagine the delay in getting these up is stripping starforce out of them one by one.

Blizzard is owned by Vivendi aka Sierra which hasn't jumped on the Steam bandwagon yet. However now that they are owned by Activision, who has jumped on board I expect we will see their catalog on steam eventually.

Bethesda is going to be based on whoever publishes their games, in the case of Oblivion it was published by Take2 who are on the Steam train already so I wouldn't be surprised to see it show up.

Stardock has their own service, I don't seem them going to Steam unless Totalgaming.net folds.

EA is not going to be on Steam. Ever.

MGS also will never be on Steam.

I don't know about that. Most arguments I can think of why they wouldn't are exactly the same ones Ubisoft has as well, plus they already publish the boxed copies of Valve games so terms must be at least somewhat amiable. While tough, it’s not completely out of the question.

My only real concern about the future of this is the messopotamia that is GFW Live/PC Gaming Alliance. I worry that a lot of mid-range developers are going to make the wrong choice when faced between having the SteamWorks tools completely free or being offered extra funds to shoehorn the somewhat broken GFW Live system into their game, or some similar offer from the Microsoft/Nvidia/Intel behemoth.

Oh god here we go again...

Beta / VHS
HD DVD / BluRay
GFW Live / Steam?

Nah. Steam for the win.

Steam has a hell of a headstart on Games for Windows Live, and Microsoft would have to plough stupendious amounts into it's developement in order to become a rival for Steam, but that's not to say that they won't, because of course they do have the oppotunity to do so.

I guess it's now a matter of PR. Valve after a rocky start with Steam, have earned the trust of the consumer and therefore are viewed as being providers of an excellent service. We of course all fear and despise Microsoft as the evil empire who wants to kill our mothers and rape our fathers, which is funny considering the vast number of people who use their products.

I guess Valve are in the state of still being a small company taking on the giant and winning with everyone cheering, but I dare say, due to the nature of the human race, we will soon start fearing that Valve become too big with steam being used for all games, therefore the company becomes a target for silliness if they put one foot wrong.

I suppose the only true concern for me is that is Steam goes offline, or you lose your net connection on a perminent basis for example, you move somewhere where downloading titles is out of the question, or there's no hope of you having even just modem connectivity to verify your account, that means you may lose access to a lot of titles that you may have purchased. But then again, no-one really thinks Steam is going to anywhere soon and by the time Steam's successor comes out, we will have all moved on from the games anyway.

Ubisoft is a major player to have on Steam and I welcome them (with a slight unease considering the bad work they did with Splinter Cell: Double Agent on PC, that really knocked my confidence in Ubisoft). However my copy of Assassin's Creed is coming though the normal post as I wanted the Director's Cut edition with the shiny case! It will be very nice if we could use the CD-Key from the retail package to download the software from steam to save having the disks in the drive. But I guess we'll have to wait to see if Steam allows this in a couple of weeks time.

Yes, but it's ad-supported. I'd pick up Far Cry with no ads for that price.

Just wait till Steam offers it's services, just "branded your way". EA and other competitors might well go for that.

I have bought probably 90% or more of my pc games in the last year from Steam, Gamersgate, Battlefront, Stardock or Matrix Games. Most by download, at least half with physical backups. The only boxed games I'm buying from the store are, well, mmos. And how often do you buy one of those?

Actually, I think Eve is on Steam now, isn't it? So maybe even those games will be easily available.

Steam is great if you have broadband. It enables impulse buying, it has frequent sales and specials, and it's got the commo stuff on top. It's what a service should be.

I was thinking the same thing. Might be time to pick up Chaos Theory on PC!

Hear hear...
Damn Ubisoft, being able to buy any game available from Steam was my main argument to root for them, but this NA & Canada only business now, it's just not rigth..., I can't even enter the "preorder" Assasin's creed page from here. Shame on you Ubi & Steam

This is really great news. I buy most of my PC games on Steam now. I do wish there was a bit of a discount though since there is no need to package the game but I guess it goes towards maintenance and bandwidth.

EA will probably be the last people to join steam because they have EA Link. EA Link is a piece of sh*t, but they are getting revenue from people who are dumb enough to pay for the extended game service.

Only EA would think of something like making people pay for a game they already bought 6 months later.

Stardock isn't going anywhere because their online distribution service sells alot more than games, and they make alot of money off that stuff so there's no reason to split the games out separately on another service.

This is good news only because hopefully there's going to be a HOMM and Rainbow Six pack for really cheap now when those games are announced.

French? I thought they were in Canada...