What's the point of the artice? I don't get all the outrage of Steamworks in Civilization V. I don't get it why author thinks all Civ fans are uber-hardcore geeks who don't care of all the other games and genres.
I play shooters, I play RTS, arcade racers, role-playing games, turn-based strategies. I play on PC and Xbox 360. As PC gamer I have Steam installed (with lots of purchased games) and think that it's the best thing that happened to PC gaming since DirectX.
Civ 4's gamespy multiplayer tech is awful - there's no friends system, there's a broken registration (somehow many gamespy games require dedicated gamespy profile, so I have to keep several of them), no game-independent chat and voice-comm. Gamespy is ancient dinosaur who just have no right to be in modern games.
To evade it I even gave to use Hamachi for multiplayer with my friends! That's just not right.
Everyone who've ever played on console (be that X360 or PS3) knows how great it is to have game-independent fiends list and ability to invite them to any MP game or just chat with them anytime. I don't even mention integrated storefront, achievments, game videos, ratings and automatic patching.
Steam is just the same thing for PC, and I think PC gaming would be long dead without Valve.
They may become a monopoly someday, but for me they have already became one - I just don't consider buying from some other DD system a viable choice anymore, because I want to install any game to fresh computer without the need to remember several DD systems' passwords or even installing several software clients. I just install Steam and have all my games, friends list immediately - with voice-chat, patches, community, forums and storefront.
Just the recent example of lame friends system in Battlefield - Bad Company 2 for PC: there's a friend list, but I can't send friend a message, I can't voice-chat with him while not on the same server, I can't invite him to my game, even the process of adding required several attempts! I know of course that console versions use Live/PSN functionality, but creating some kind of surrogate Xbox Live for PC is just stupid, while there's Steam available!
Anyway, all this text can be summarised in one sentence: I like Steam and very glad to have it in Civ 5.
____
Some of you may tell that forcing Steam on gamers is violation of their rights, but think of the other aspect of it - there's NO way to give good unified community/patching functionality without forcing every gamer to install some kind of client. It's either poor functionality (like in BF:BC2 for PC and most steam-less games) and lots of unneeded work for developers (they have to make this functionality for every damn PC game, while same thing is already available on consoles and is working great with no extra cost) or fast Steamworks implementation (compared to doing it all by yourself) and great functionality.
If not Steam, we'd have every publisher (or, worse, developer) using their own community systems, and that'll be a disaster - remember Rockstar's horrible unneeded Social Club or latest Ubisoft's attempts.
And we can't allow Microsoft to have a monopoly with their inderior Windows Live, because Mac users will be left out of the gaming for a very-very long time then.