About one-and-a-half years ago I disliked Steam. Why should I get a third-party-program to play my games?
But after a while I gave it the benefit of the doubt and tried it.
And now I like Steam a lot, it's easy, works good, not too intrusive and as a DRM-measure I think it's waaay better than Securom, Starforce, etc.
I also like to have all my games and game-buddies in a central hub. It's nice and tidy, easy for (re)installs and updates, etc.
At the moment most of my games are on Steam (I started using Steam about a year ago, but bought quite some games in sales.).
When games have Steamworks (eg Civ5, Fallout New Vegas, Shogun 2, etc) I buy them retail. Then you have best of both worlds. A nice box on the shelf, the lowest retail price, and it's in Steam.
Steam is a blessing for me and PC gaming in general.I have only 2 complaints:
1)You can't sell games that you own.
2)Region restrictions.When some ******ed a-hole local publisher gets a contract with game developers and can only publish their games in that region via retail.No digital sales.Example:1C in Russia.They have a contract with 2K.I want to get Pirates!(remake) on steam.Because of them i can't.And they don't print new copies of old games.They didn't even localize the final patch for that game!!!That's one a-hole publisher.
I agree.
Also the price differences between EU/UK/US is sometimes very frustrating.
Edit:
Oh, never had any problems playing offline and on my laptop I
always play offline (broken wifi). Works like a charm.
Once every month or so I hook it up on cable to update it and (de)install games.
The only gripe I have about playing offline is that it doesn't register the hours played or any achievements. But that's minor.