Honestly, it sucks for people that have trouble with it. But what are the alternatives? You buy a hardcopy and something goes wrong (lose the key, lose the disc, disc stops working etc) you get to start over and buy a new copy. You can make a backup but most casual gamers dont know how to correctly or simply dont think they should need to. Hardcopies take up shelf space at stores and in warehouses... the PC gaming took a nose dive as sales fell when the consoles started getting powerful enough to really draw people in. So with just hard copies we get no innovation because no-one wants to take a chance on wasting sales space. Cloud style gaming and game downloading helped the PC games stay afloat. As far as patches breaking mods... thats something that has happened since the beginning of "moding" pc games. You are changing something the developer is still responcible for. It is NOT their fault your mod gets messed up. It sucks... but you cannot blame a game developer for this fact. Steam has issues. But from someone that has seen the rise of PC games (started playing PC games with text based adventure games on a TRS80) Steam and the future of cloud gaming is good for the industry as it allowed game designers to once again experiment with features and ideas and freedom to really try new things that if they stayed with the old model of business (hardcopy ONLY) they would have more then likely been 5 years behind where we are now.