Steam is good... Yes. Has Valve gotten a bit greedy with it? Yeah.
But Steam is fine because it's legitimate... and you can't beat that auto download feature when you log into a server that's running custom maps.

I agree in the most part, though I am fed up with some game companies (I'm looking at YOU, Atari for your god-awful Path of Neo PC Release!) releasing crumby game after having spent £30-40 on them!! so, I often download game illegally (oh, the shame!), and then if they are rubbish i uninstall them, and if they are good (like half-life 2, rainbow six: raven shield, darwinia, battlefield 2 etc) I pay for them. I think that this is a good system, although i DO NO like people to download a game, play it and not pay for it!!

EA and Valve seem to be good publishers, and so i largly trust their releases now, although Path of Neo was a n absolute disgrace! forced 8x anti aliasing and texture filtering if I had downloaded that game first, I would have discovered it was rubbish and not given my £35 to Atari!