Steam is Valve's community gaming program. They use it to distribute and monitor their games, using a similar paradigm as many P2P networking stuff.
Essentially you can purchase games from Steam that are released by Valve. Steam auto-installs the game, autodetecting stuff like vid and sound cards and so on. You can then use Steam community programs to get involved in their online games, stuff like Team Fortress 2 and so on. From what I hear the community support is top notch as is the text support and feedback stuff. Steam games are also really cheap and easy to use.
The downside? You can't play any games you've purchased/instaled via Steam unless Steam is on your computer. Valve can also yank your Steam account at any time, effectively rendering you incapable of playing any of their games. They do this as an effort to prevent piracy and 99% of the time those whose accounts get yanked are pirates, hackers and so on. The other 1% of the time...
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Epsilon
Essentially you can purchase games from Steam that are released by Valve. Steam auto-installs the game, autodetecting stuff like vid and sound cards and so on. You can then use Steam community programs to get involved in their online games, stuff like Team Fortress 2 and so on. From what I hear the community support is top notch as is the text support and feedback stuff. Steam games are also really cheap and easy to use.
The downside? You can't play any games you've purchased/instaled via Steam unless Steam is on your computer. Valve can also yank your Steam account at any time, effectively rendering you incapable of playing any of their games. They do this as an effort to prevent piracy and 99% of the time those whose accounts get yanked are pirates, hackers and so on. The other 1% of the time...
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Epsilon