Actually the cheapest Steam (Bronze) is 5 dollars less than the normal retail. It's extremely costly to run Steam so that's why the prices is what it is. But the main reason it's not at a lower price is that Vivendi won't allow them to sell for cheap otherwise it would be a breach of their contract since it would take sales away from them. well I would rather the bulk of my money go to Valve and not Vivendi. so if I do end up with some free cash I'll get it on steam, does it come as something you can burn? like an iso or zip or whatever? I am not paying for a program I can't back up <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yeah, just last week Valve introduced a Backup feature in Steam which packs the files into self extracting files so it's easy to burn and reinstall. I haven't done it yet but I think they have an option to split into CD sized files and DVD sized files which is cool since I haven't gotten a DVD burner yet.