Oh, and just to be complete here, I went ahead and purchased HL2 via Steam when they made the purchases available. Mostly because I wanted to try out the Source engine with the Counter-Strike:Source game and see how it performed on my hardware. The answer being: Very nicely, thank you.

And in the process, got a bit hooked on Counter-Strike:Source. I don't know exactly why, I never really liked the original Counter-Strike, but I really do enjoy playing Counter-Strike:Source. I think it's because the user interface is simpler and cleaner, and everything is so much more clear. There's a lot less confusion about things. There's only one type of Terrorist and one type of Counter-Terrorist, so you don't have that class selection screen, and there's less confusion about who is your friend and who is your foe. When I center my crosshairs on someone, I can see instantly whether they're a friend or a foe. In regular CS, it's all a big mess on the screen.

However, CS:S has some incredibly serious problems that have soured my experience. It's terribly buggy for a 1.0 release, and there is no anti-cheat functionality in place yet.

Problems I've seen with CS:S are...

1. Players can crash every client on a server simply by naming themselves "%n" and then getting killed. That's a real pain, being mid-game and getting an unchecked buffer crash. That's just sloppy.

2. Many of the developer-mode console commands that were intended to help debug the rendering engine never got tagged as cheat codes. So there are built-in cheat console commands with the final shipping version. You can, for example, see players through walls with a couple of the codes, or reverse the Z order of the rendering pipeline. That makes playing on a server frustrating, knowing that the 12-year old kids can see you before you can see them.

3. I saw a player that was freely speeding around the map and moving through walls as if they were in Spectator mode, but they were able to participate in the game and shoot other players. For instance you would start a round, and almost instantly the guy would show up and start shooting you at your own base. Now THAT made me upset.

4. The voice chat system works great when people are using it as part of the game. But then there are 12-year olds who think it's funny to spam garbage into the microphone. And the user interface for muting a noisy player takes about three clicks too many and requires that you remember their name in your head after you've gone two levels into a menu system.

But the biggest problem I saw with Steam so far has been the problem that Tod ran into...

He had the ATI coupon saying he gets HL2 for free. And he wanted to use the coupon, but he wanted the Silver package, meaning he'd be charged ten bucks instead of getting the package for free. But nowhere on the card or the Steam purchase screens did it actually tell him how to redeem the coupon for the Silver package. So he ended up paying full price on the Silver package and never got prompted for his coupon code. And emails to Valve billing have met with callous boilerplate "no refunds" responses, and he's being forced to dispute the credit card charge instead of getting a simple fix from Valve. That's very poor customer service right there.

If they want to champion this mode of content distribution, they need to treat it with as much reverence as they do the boxed games... Such as not shipping an unfinished version, and treating the paying customers with some respect.