All of the things you say are true, and I also agree on the &quot;self-inflicted&quot; delays a sibling poster mentions.<p>All of these mattered very little to me when I went to reinstall a game I hadn&#x27;t played in two years, after a move and a computer crash.  I have games on physical media that I can no longer install, or that I can&#x27;t find the discs for.  Fantastic games like Bioware RPGs, or Borderlands.<p>With Steam, I can open a fresh machine, install the Steam app, and then install (mac versions of) games I bought in pc-version, or for which I no longer can find the media.<p>Between Steam&#x27;s library sharing, access to cross-platform versions of games, and the fact that I can install it from scratch anywhere I have an internet connection, I don&#x27;t want to buy games any other way.  There are many ways to improve, but that ease of recovery and reinstallation (not to mention that it saves my save-games in the cloud for some RPGs) has been well worth any performance hits.<p>The &quot;whole app&quot; is tiny, and I need to update it maybe once a month.  It&#x27;s not worth complaining about.