Valve has had some serious publishing rollouts lately, they've just announced Unreal Tournament 3 via Steam right on the heels of some Atari releases. Seems like they've hit a success threshold and it's accelerating.

I was initially a detractor, but now I'm hoping Steam becomes the dominant publishing / delivery system for PC Games. I'd love to see Valve put the retail chains to shame.

Electronics Boutique / Gamestop has been shitting all over the market with its craptastic used-software trade-in nonsense. I don't want to buy my games from a glorified pawn shop and stand in line all day while some kid digs his trades out of his knapsack. Fuck the greedy retailers, I'd prefer to give my money to a service that caters to gamers and the game industry as a whole.

While I'm throwing the profanity around: Fuck "Games for Windows" and Microsoft's "Windows Live" service leveraged from Xbox Live. Works great on the console, but it's pure suckage for the PC. Poorly recycled. I keep hearing this garbage about Microsoft wanting to revitalize the PC games market, but all I see is them trying to lock out competition. You don't revitalize by trying to milk every little drop out of the scraps that are there!

Is Epic listening to this? I know they're probably stuck behind their "exclusive" deals with Microsoft, but if Gears of War was available on Steam I would have bought it already. I hope UT3 sells like hotcakes on Steam and convinces them to sell their PC games where the gamers are, because we're not sitting on Live now are we?

It's odd to wish for a monopoly in the market, but Valve has shown some serious integrity with how they've run Steam. The other options out there make me shudder.