After reading Braid and DoW 2 discussions, I'm pretty fed up with every topic mentioning 'Steam' or 'Impulse' resolving into discussion about one of those clients. Personally, I couldn't care less about 'DRM' that Steam is, and I don't even know if impulse really is or isn't some kind of DRM... Anyway, here you go, topic to discuss your personal attitude or whatever, so it's not spread out trough 10 other...

I just like playing games don't really care where i get them from(steam, impulse or whatever). that's all i'm ever gonna say on this subject. ;)

I've grown tired about the DRM hysteria. I bet alot of people just scream along without really knowing why it should bother them.
Bad coding, unwanted and often crappy localisation, censorship, million-different edition syndrome and shitty multi/ solo play balancing has ruined more games for me than DRM has ever done so far.

Well, you do know that I don't like such services in general. Maybe because I'm not a "hardcore" PC gamer. I just want games. I don't want to sign into some stupid service just to play a game. In a perfect world that wouldn't be a problem as people would just use whatever client they prefer or (in my case) non at all. But since these services are linked to your ability to actually run the game (and games are distributed more and more as exclusives), I don't have a choice. I can either miss out on the games (which is what I do) or put up with a service I don't like. I might have to accept this (for now, in my opinion this is monopolistic behaviour and should be regulated), but I don't have to like it.

Meh, I like Steam, for me it isn't a hassle or anything.
Hell, it's my main IM client too.

You're lucky then, but there are others why might prefer another or no such client. The point is that I want to be able to chose. A service like steam should attract (and keep) customers through honest service, not by forcing their product down the customer's throat.

so you made another post about it? ;-)
I don't get the hate personally... i know lots of people hated it until they tried it, but they all love it now. Guess its kind of like sushi...

Actually I did try it... but I'm not really interested in online games, which makes the whole thing more of an annoyance than anything else.
Edit. The game started this post was Braid, a game that I'm really interested in, but am unable to get unless I put up with Steam. And yes, that makes me a bit mad.

Yes, so I can link everyone in here :-P

Xbox Live Arcade, SUCKAS!

And what exactly was the problem with it? It doesn't really eat up system resources, you don't even have to launch it, since it can autolaunch after start and autologin... On top of that, it automatically patches all your games and you have all your games accessible from wherever there's connection to the internet. As a price, games call home sometimes - but still, you can play in offline mode.
You said Steam is monopolising the industry - so is Microsoft and I doubt you're only playing games compatible with multiple operating systems

Microsoft isn't really involved with the publishing. You can take it or leave it. Games are only confined to Windows on technical grounds.
Anyway, I'll reinstall Steam to freshen up my memory, let's see how it goes.
Edit: OK, just installed it and I don't know what it's doing but it's almost locking up my system with over 1 GIGABYTE of IO activity in the first two minutes.
Update: Argh... I've forgotten that Steam can't have games installed anywhere but in it's program folder, which is on my system drive and not my games.
And what's that Steam background program doing in my services list?
Update: Well, Steam can't create desktop icons, so I can't test the "official" oneclick method, but launching the games directly (which at least works) takes 15 seconds to authenticate before the game launches and doesn't quit Steam after I close the game.
Update: I'm also getting an invitation to some group over and over again and can't figure out to get rid of it WITHOUT joining.
Update: I think I remember now what I disliked most about steam: The default themes. God, this thing is ugly. I finally found some replacement skins, but there's apparently no official standard, so usually ones from last year work while older ones produce horrible graphics corruption.

Jeebus dude! I have never had anything like that happen with Steam. You have to be the unluckiest Steam user ever.
Personally, I don't like the fact that Steam is a requirement for some games, but as for a DRM scheme, it is probably the least offensive of the invasive schemes out today. I can grudgingly accept it, if it makes the game developers comfortable with selling me convenient digital downloads that have unlimited installations and automatic updates.
Impulse is unfortunately a better service on paper, but in practice it is almost nothing but fail. The client has to be one of the least user-friendly applications I have ever seen and the last time I tried using it, its performance was far worse than the first generation Steam client. It is still relatively new, so it has the potential to improve, but as it stands now, it is not worht the effort for me. Besides, there were almost no games available through it that I wanted.
Since I've already said too much, I'll keep these short:
GameTap: ripoff
Direct2Drive: burned me once, never again.

And the story continues. Apparently Steam didn't quite recognise the games from my previous install... it kept saying "Download starting", eventhough the game was already there and ready to run (and in fact did run when I clicked launch). So I uninstalled them. While trying to reinstall I got the following message: "Steam Service Failure: Please restart Steam and try installation again", along with a horrible sound every time I focus the window. How do I turn the sound off?
Update, also I get a new memory dump in my Steam directory every time I close it. I'm up to 19 now.

Impulse trashes steam. (by my opinion atleast)
it dont need to run when you play your games, gotten really useful and good patches the last months, and it get a big version up wery soon now. it got a good comunity, and more and more (developers) are signing up whit them.