Steam

I love steam; the way it burns through your skin... ok I'm really talking about Steam; Valve's online content delivery service which I have more of a love/minor irritation relationship with. At first I had an issue with not actually having a physical copy of the game but it wasn't really that much of a hurdle to overcome to realize that I don't really care about owning the box just the product and the idea of not needing to hunt around for where I left that DVD case appealed so I quickly got over that.

I was playing Half Life 2: Episode 1 with commentary on and recently it just started crashing for no reason. At first I assumed it was something to do with hardware but now I think it might be a regression in one of the background updates. This presents a problem since I didn't know about that update until I read the RSS feed I had on it and suddenly the game stops working without me knowing about it. Of course that's more of an issue with testing a patch rather than with the content delivery system.

I just bought X³ from Steam after moaning about a game working on it. I haven't actually had a chance to play it for any length yet. This is another point about Steam. All games I've bought (as far as I recall) I've preloaded so they have been ready for launch. In the case of X³ it was quicker than buying it from an online store but longer than going to a shop and buying it, taking it home and installing it from DVD. Still I am prone to buying things at 1am so Steam really helps this :D and given I'm looking to buy Dark Messiah on Steam rather than in a store then it is quite obvious I prefer it as a platform over traditional purchasing methods.