Talking about Borderlands in the interview, Pitchford veered momentarily off topic to suggest "a lot of the industry" doesn't trust Steam-proprietor Valve, that the Half-Life 2 dev ought to spin off its military-green wrap-around content delivery service--a service some 20 million of you use, or have at one time or another--to remedy a "conflict of interest," and that it's "really, really dangerous for the rest of the industry to allow Valve to win."

I take Pitchford's point about too much power in the hands of a single distributor, about those distributors using market leverage to dictate terms and margins, about the "little guys" lacking the clout to push back, about guys like Valve become the deciders, etc. It's the oldest story in the world. You can make the same points about retail outfits like GameStop (do a search on "GameStop" and "criticism" and see what turns up). But there's a lot that's wrong with this industry, and priorities are priorities. Steam's been low on my list of topics to cavil about.

And then something happened. Last night I pulled up at my desk, flipped the power switch on my Windows box, plucked tufts of dog hair off the fan grill while it booted, and got ready to play-review a new game.

And then? Then I discovered I wouldn't be playing the game anytime soon.

I'd pulled the game down a few weeks ago using Steam, an all-niter grab. When it finished, the launch line read "100% - Ready" in tiny Tahoma lettering. I booted it up once or twice, fooled around with the tutorials, played a few skirmishes, then set it aside to wrap some other work.