Srry is a Valve fanboy. Now sad. Now imagine, Counter-Strike used to run at 60fps+ on a PIII 700MHz, 128MB and a TNT2. What happened? Steam happened.
For all it's automatic patching, game organizing goodness, instant gratification goodness, there's a dark side.
First, it's DRM, Valve can shut down your account at any time, ban you from playing online, and your games will dissapear. Everytime you want to play a game, Valve demands you authenticate yourself, even if it's an offline single-player game! Not everyone has 1/2GB of memory! Steam has a noticeable drag on a computer, about as much as Windows Live Messenger 8. According to the Steam Hardware Survery, almost half of all users have only 512MB.
What does Steam do with these system resources? Well takes 10 seconds to login, checks for mandatory updates & displays the STeam store. It also data mines. Valve talks about Steam being a great tool to collect data to solve technical issues, but Steam actively snoopes around, the only thing I can be sure it's trying to find is pirated Valve games.
Second, automatic patching is very nice if and only if you have a 5Mbps+ internet connection. Otherwise you have to wait and wait for a game to update, just to play it, even Half-Life 2. Dial-up users are left in the dust. For them, they've always bought games on disc and installed it without a fuss. Even a CD Key online check takes only a little bit of bandwidth. With automatic patching, Valve can force crappy updates upon us, such as continual de-optimization, DWP, Steam Profiles, and ADVERTISEMENTS!!! With Steam, it's stay updated or get the fuck out.
The Steam store is a great idea actually. If Steam was just a store and one-time CD Key verifier, that'd be great. It's instant download purchases for those who don't care about a box (and the consumer protection laws that come with buying a box). Today it's just a giant shill for non-Valve games that can be bought as a Steam-less version on CDs/ online download.
Steam is an annoyance. I'd be great if Valve got rid of it.