It's like saying "This car has a lot of horsepower, and even if you don't want to use it and would be fine just walking, we're going to force you to use the car anyway."ToastiestZombie said:What if you DONT have them, then cd key+disc in the drive doas absolute shit. Have you even heard that it does much more than voice and text chat. It saves your game if you want to download it again, it doesn't require you to put in a key all you do is download then play, it keeps all of your games in one convenient place and it gives you instant updates. Why do you think that that is a valid argument, I could say that this fancy car has lots of horsepower, but I dont want to use that horsepower so it is the worst car in the world.
I wouldn't have as big of a problem with Steam if it was just for the registration. What pisses me off is that it has to be running whenever I want to play. That's bullshit.
Also, why wouldn't you have the disc and cd-key with you, if you bought a retail copy? Did you lose or break them? You need to take better care of your stuff.
EDIT: One more thing. All of those other features you mentioned, like automatic updates, are useless to me. In fact, I specifically want to update my games manually so I know what's happening on my PC.