While I understand that I’m giving up “owning” the game, Steam has a good track record of trying to make users happy. It being a private company means that it’s beholden to users rather than shareholders. In this instance, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, at least for me. I don’t have enough space in my home for the 100s of games I have on top of not having to worry about disks getting scratched or corrupted. Then I also don’t have to worry about downloading game patches from a 20 year old site that may or may not still be up (AoE 2) to keep playing on a modern OS. Also, there’s a centralized space for users to communicate, upload mods, host servers, etc. without having to jump through different hoops for different games (Hamachi, GameSpy, etc.).

That being said, I appreciate that there are alternatives for people that feel differently. And I appreciate there are alternatives and competition (even people like you) keeping corporate greed in check and making Valve have to work to stay good for users.

When Gabe Newell dies or leaves the company though, I’ll be watching closely to see who the new CEO will be and figure it out from there.