"Half-Life 2 pre-loading begins to Steam account holders today. Over the coming days, those who have selected the pre-loading option will have encrypted Half-Life 2 files delivered to their PC. No purchase is required to pre-load HL2, but is required to activate the game. Purchase options will be released soon. Then, the moment the game is made available, those who have pre-loaded and purchased Half-Life 2 via Steam will be authenticated and ready to start playing."
- Steam News

I'm curious to see how that little plan works out for them. One hopes that the encryption on the Steam files is strong enough to resist the (what is sure to be) prodigious efforts by countless dedicated hackers.

Steam, as a concept, sounds cool. This little experiment of theirs is going to show whether it truly works in practice.

I wasn't overly impressed when the network showed maybe a 35% utilitization, and my steam client told me the network was to busy and try again in a few hours. Seems it dosen't load balance too well, and a paying customer won't be happy to see that error.

The nice thing is ATI customers who got the HL2 coupons have access to it this way. I still haven't seen my copy of Doom 3 on my doorstep, and was last told mid August for it to ship.