[citation][nom]Tindytim[/nom]I love Steam, but I think out of all the games I use with steam, I have only bought a single game off of them.I absolutely hate Digital Distribution when it comes to things of any real value (Music, Movies, Games). It's a lot safer with a hard copy, and I have something nice to put up on the shelf, and some nice boxart, with some artwork (in most cases).[/citation]
So how is a large company with distributed servers all over the world more likely to screw up than your CD/DVD is to get scratched? I prefer downloading games, I often lose a game that I bought a few years earlier.
As for downloading time, well Steam downloads at my maximum speed (around 1.5MB/s), so that's not too bad. Updates are usually done in less than 30 seconds. It doesn't really take any longer to download a game than it does to go to the store and buy it. At 1.5MB/s I can get 5400MB/hour, so most games take much less than an hour to download.