What overlay?  I have all that crap turned off.  All Steam is to me is a digital store and I've come to like the game management piece of it too.  I have all the other "features" turned off and never use 'em since I don't need 'em.  Simple to do in the options.  When I started to use Steam I thought I would be putting everything in offline mode but honestly after using it I didn't see the point.  I'm online 24x7 anyway and the Steam client itself just doesn't take up that much memory and goes to "sleep" when you're actually playing a game.  So what do I care if it's running all the time.

That's all fine and dandy until somehow, for some reason, something goes wrong. It could be anything from the service going broke ten years down the road due to mismanagement, certain games being removed from steam due to some lawsuit, you accidentally (or rightly so) ask for a refund and get booted or get booted due to some other forum altercation, etc etc ... it all results in you losing ALL of the content that you paid for.Every last single little piece of everything that they have their hands on.

If you manage your files yourself, whether it be digital copies or boxed retail versions, you are the only one directly responsible for what happens to those sets of discs / files. I dont' trust a third party that requires intrusive DRM, it's simply the way it is. It is an unwanted drain on my system, it does things that I don't want it to do and I just do not want to have what is essentially a leach having me plugged in all the time to the network.

Don't ever say it 'will never happen' because just like Enron, Alltel, and Gamestop Selling PC games (back in the old days) policies and events can change very drastically for very simple reasons. I refuse to let someone else manage the content that I paid for when negligence or self-serving interest on their part can take, damage, destroy, or otherwise twist the content out of my hands. It is as simple as that. I was burned by the steam service once, I'll never ever let it happen again if I can help it.

And you think that can't happen with any other DD service? Or games for that matter? A friend of mine was banned from a game because some anti-cheat garbage that came with it thought he was using a VPN (which he wasn't).

The difference is only that with Steam you lose more if it goes wrong, but with one account instead of fourteen there's less chance that one of them will have something go wrong (plus you don't have to manage fourteen accounts and try to remember which one has each game).

Losing or breaking retail disks is far more likely then something happening to your online account, particularly if you have kids. And since retail is going away anyway you won't have much choice soon. What company wants to keep giving a store a giant cut of the sales when they can make double per sale from an online store for the same product?

I'm not aware of anyone in this thread arguing against the services being offered.  Rather, it is the restrictions entailed by them that we disagree with.  This has nothing to do with technological advancement, and everything to do with policy and legal decisions at both a government and corporate level.  These features certainly could be offered without the onerous DRM, they just aren't.

Copyright is an artificial construct designed to spur creativity and balance power between conusmers and producers of media.  In response to piracy, governments have granted sweeping new rights to rightsholders (which are just ignored by pirates...) while providing no new protections or safeguards to consumers, who now face an increasingly lopsided relationship where they have little to no (legal) recourse. This is what I have a problem with, not the technology or services themselves. 

I feel that your argument is equally applicable to justifying software piracy.  "Attempting to get in the way of new and more efficient distribution channels is futile; publishers should just get out of the way to avoid being run over".  Saying that someone's rights don't matter if it's holding back technology is an argument I feel holds no water, regardless of whether the rights being stripped are of the producer or the consumer.  While both consumers and producers do need to adapt to new technology, the law needs to continually strike a balance between their interest, and right now the legal reality is so lopsided in the favour of the rightsholder that it's actually scary.

I over the many years that I've had STEAM have purchased over a hundred STEAM games.  I am not aware of any onerous DRM issues and any restrictions by STEAM on my account.  I have not once had an issue downloading, re-downloading, updating, validating or playing any of my many STEAM games.  While I'm only one single example, the governing corporation Valve/Vivendi sure have proven themselves to me anyway.

"Artificial construct"?  It appears that at the present time quite a few nations of the world are finding out just how much of everything around them in daily life has turned out to be artificial.  We can sit here all day discussing "artificial constructs" to what end?  Digital distribution and management is the future for media (especially software) for many reasons and sometimes individual rights take a backseat in favour of allowing for more advancement.  You seem to have a "rights" problem/issue, while I guess I have a "don't care" position as long as service is provided and/or constantly improved upon (which STEAM is a prime example of).

It's not my argument.  It's what's been happening not only because (as I suspect some of you might suggest) we've been allowing it to happen but more so because each new generation craves such technological advancement.  Of course in most cases such advancement can only be possible when individual "rights" aren't legalised to death.  Captialism encourages competition through which we enjoy advancement, focus on legislation of rights consumer or producer serves to (among other things) stifle same.