FWIW, I've been using Steam since the release of Half-Life 2, and in my limited personal experience it has been a far better investment than buying software on

FWIW, I've been using Steam since the release of Half-Life 2, and in my limited personal experience it has been a far better investment than buying software on physical media. Steam has let me migrate software from machine to machine as I upgrade, and makes recovering from corruption or a lost hard drive a simple solution of merely redownloading the files needed. Physical media has not proven durable enough, nor media formats long-lasting enough, for buying hard copies to be a viable strategy in this particular use case. Incidentally the physical-media durability problem has driven me toward almost exclusively using streaming services for music, although the arcane copyright system applied to digital music is a factor here. If it were legal, I'd much rather simply make a few archival copies on various storage devices.