No, there are hackers that break into Steam and do this, they just have to hack into a single system instead of hundreds... as happended around a week ago

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Steam-compromised-by-hackers-1377240.html

I do agree with many of the people here that Steam wasn't the best choice. I hope Bethesda will not continue to do so...

Pirates have already gotten around it. There is a working version out there already.

Number 2, I hate Steam. There is no reason I should have to disable my antivirus, my firewall, reboot in safe mode, and whatever stupid workarounds that I had to try to get the damned thing to INSTALL while having an internet connection. I should NEVER have to use an unsecured internet connection to do something, yet until I did all of the above, Steam would NOT update. And I'm not the only one that has had this problem.

Unfortunately, I'm not an idiot and actually use security software. Apparently in order to get the damned thing to work without monkeying around with it, I have to be an idiot and not use security software because the damned thing doesn't like most of the most popular programs out there. Instead of, you know, getting it to work with them.

And yes, I ran it as administrator. No dice. Disabled antivirus. No dice. Disabled firewall. No dice. Ran in safe mode, with networking. No dice. Screw it, reboot. Try again. Worked. NEVERMIND that my AV was running, firewall was running, I was running it as administrator and I wasn't in safe mode. Like the first time I tried to run it and got error 5, access denied.

My opinion still stands. Steam is a piece of dung and I wish they'd have used something else. Hell, I've never had any other DRM do this.

Steam is not a spyware, it is just you people are paranoid(It will only gather your info for Hardware&Software survey, if you deliberately allow it to do). Steam is not 3rd party tool since Valve becomes publishing partner of the games that on Steam. Last but not least, your discs will vanish, steam will there be forever, digital distribution is future, but you wouldn't understand that if you're american anyway, where everything is console centric.