> Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? It just works and doesn't get in the way. In all my time using Steam, I've never had a

> Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? It just works and doesn't get in the way. In all my time using Steam, I've never had a case when it wasn't maxing out my bandwidth during a download. The only friction I can remember is with Half Life 2, which required you to use Steam to decode the files installed with your physical DVD and that took ages. But that was the first real game ever shipped on the platform. On the dev side, Steam seems pretty easy to integrate.