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You don't understand the scale and logistical differences. It's like comparing a guy selling stuff out of his trunk to the entirety of eBay.

Eve map, each point of which is a solar system The glow intensity indicates population density

Eve market screen for 1 item showing all buy/sell prices in the region

Those billboards are created by the server you're playing on replacing the normal billboard texture with an advertisement. Nothing to do with Valve.

Are you sure?

"Valve's Doug Lombardi confirmed that in-game advertising, served by IGA, will appear in CS 1.6, and in CS:Source later on. He spoke to CS-nation about the ads, where he said, 'There will be some ads posted on walls in the game world, an ad on the scoreboard screen, and one in the letterboxed area of Spectator mode. Counter-Strike levels aren't going to turn into Times Square or a Nextel Cup racecar. We have control over what ads show up in Counter-Strike and how they are presented.'"

"Counter-Strike's in-game adverts are the pilot for a Steam-wide system Valve intend to offer to independent developers, Gabe Newell has explained..."

I remember there also being a online distribution system that had the possibility of buying Prey online (I think it was even offered at closing of the demo of Prey), with a service which name eludes me now:

Well, The Steam Review has a blog/report on the closing of Triton; an online games distribution system that once hosted Prey.

The closing of Triton is a lesson on how not to shut down DD systems. While I fully support Steam and buy all my valve products through it, it is always important to know what could happen. We can only hope Valve takes up Triton's lesson and prepares fail safes. As of now, Valve has tested and says they are prepared to allow bypassing the authentication servers should their service be offline for an extended time. This is a good first step in preparations, but it is still a small step.

You are fully allowed to backup all steam games to disk; it even provides you with a function to do so with minimal work.

In my personal opinion, Digital purchasing of Steam games is just as safe as physical purchases, easier, and (in some cases) cheaper. The real arguement is what if Steam's gone for good and that'll affect all the Steam games equally.

Apparently a lot of the awfully strict (and downright annoying) rules regarding credit cards are as a result of banks and credit card companies - it seems that if Valve aren't extremely careful, even a small amount of fraud could cost silly amounts of money. The existing rules and regulations just don't appear to be geared up to online-only digital distribution - perhaps this is partly why nobody's really tried it on a large scale before...

Steam runs under Cedega, and the existing Linux client looks like it might be extended from account handling to the full thing as a part of Steam 3.0. You could also download through Steam then apply the latest Linux patch...perhaps. ;-)