What are the pros and cons of Steam?

I know a couple of its features, but why is it good to use stream and what is it offering us that we need or enchance the game etc?

What are the pros and cons.?

Or is it pretty useless?

Cant we have a seperate forum for Steam issues it seems to dominate the General Discussion forum and is getting boring now.

From what I can tell, the advantages for us as users are as follows(devs & publishers have their own list of pros & cons but I've no interest in those):

Pros:

1) Allows us to easily purchase games online and have them delivered faster than by going out and grabbing the dvd or getting it by post.

2) For users who want their games kept up to date, by default steam will download and install the patches for you so you can be sure you're running the latest version.

3) I think it will allow you to login to any PC and have all your purchased games available to download and install. Though obviously you can't play them on multiple machines as you have only 1 licence.

4) No more CD's to lose or damage, just a login to remember.

Cons:

1) Slower to launch games.

2) By default your game will be kept up to date, regardless of whether you want that patch. You can change your preferences, I believe.

3) Lots of stuff on the valve website seems to suggest it doesn't always work well with virus checkers, firewalls. I think I've also read official advice telling users to disable these programs if they are experiencing issues. I would question wtf this software is doing to require this and also the sanity of such advice.

4) I can't see how the games would run any quicker and they may infact run slower, but I have no evidence to back this up other than "gut feeling" based on the knowledge I've gained in my 15 year career as a professional software developer looking at how software interacts.

5) Offers less control about what is installed and where to, than if you do things the traditional way. Lots of stuff is happening under the hood and there is no visibility and not sufficient fidelity in control. Some people like to know what is going on to their computers.

6) Offers another point of failure, and another sub-system for Fm2012 users to have to understand when they seek support. This is not helped by cryptic error messages making it difficult to determine what is going on and where and why the failure occurred. e.g. what does "Game Unavailable At This Time, Please Try Again Later" mean? Why precisely is my game unavailable? Do I need to fix my internet? Reinstall? Sacrifice a chicken?

There are probably more pros & cons, but those are the ones which immediately spring to mind.

Ultimately Steam is being used by Sega/Sports Interactive for their own advantage. The only way you can argue forcing Steam on end users can benefit those end users is if SI/Sega make more money as a result, which gets ploughed back into the game.

Given that hooky copies of fm2012 are already about and the general backlash there has been with lots of people(like me) only finding out about the steam only issue after we'd bought the game, I imagine sales of Fm2013 will be way down now that many of us have been burnt once. I think SI may have shot themselves in the foot, to be honest.