I am now one of those gamers who buys the majority of their games via legal digital downloads. I use Steam for most of them, gog,com for older games when I want the extra goodies and ease of use with Vista, and am trying Impulse.com for dirt-cheap older games.

Just today I bought Dragon Age in the enhanced digital edition and Far Cry 2 with the added content via Steam.

This is rapidly becoming the distribution methods of choice and digital downloads are going to be the way we get our content in the future. I am glad to see this being recognized.

Steam continues to be a bloated piece of software. Aside from that, I can't recall, when you download from Steam do you get a zip file or other compressed image, or a Steamified installed image? If it's the former I don't mind. If it's the latter, that means if I ever move stuff between computers I have to RE download something I already paid for and downloaded once. Installs from disks are more straightforward.

@Robert: in what way is Steam bloated? The interface is responsive enough on my increasingly ancient PC (last Windows XP install: February 2007 and barring the GPU, the hardware is at least a year older) and my Steam install directory weighs in at 100mb, of which 40mb is the "winui.gcf" configuration file!

I can also confirm that you can copy Steam game data from one machine to another without any issues - (and/or have the games installed on two machines, so long as you don't try to have two copies of the game running at the same time) - in any event, there's no limits on how many times you can re-download a game! Obviously there's a time factor for people on low-bandwidth connections, but that's a separate matter.

There's more fundamental commercial/political/philosophical issues around portals like Steam, but as far as I can see, it does what it's meant to do - and (at least for the moment) with considerably more flexibility and freedom than some of the alternatives!