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Digital Distribution Good News
Gamasutra has a piece looking at the good news in digital distribution. Getting games to consumers with bits, rather than boxes, seems to ensure that we'll have a wider variety of titles to choose from in the future. The path looks at indie title Red Orchestra on its path to our desktops. From the article: "Of course, with a digital distribution deal, there is usually no big marketing push from the distributor like there is with a big publisher. But, through Steam we would be selling into the hardcore FPS gamer market. And as a result of the Valve deal, Red Orchestra got solid editorial exposure in major PC game publications, including two page 'preview' articles in PC Gamer US and UK."
You can easily backup your steam data files. Right click a game and goto properties. You'll see a backup option where you can the put the files on the media of your choice. The cd key is not needed as you just reinstall Steam and the restore your backup which will then be patched to the latest version. As for Steam going under, it's been stated that if that happen Valve will release a patch to untie the games from Stream but it going under is very unlikely for at least a while seeing how popular it is starting to become.
The game released on Steam is the sequal to the UT2K4 mod.