J_C said:
Steam: Click on buy, use paypal (or credit card). Download game. Play. Future updates are automatic.
You're forgetting something: These factors are NOT convenient to do out of the blue. Paypal is a royal pain in the ass, and getting a credit card involves having to go all the way to some store that sells these things so you can prepay them, and this part has ALSO become a pain in the ass as of late. A significant amount of effort is involved in setting this up.
Torrentry, on the other hand, has minimal setup cost: You get your torrentry application of choice, and you start running.
J_C said:
Torrent: Search for torrent. If the game is not new, you might have to search longer for a torrent with enough seeds, unless you want to download with 10 kb/s rate.
If your game is not on Steam at all, you're completely SOL and must resort to this anyway. This is, of course, AFTER you have already invested all this effort in getting on Steam in the FIRST place. And it is not as if Steam downloads will somehow magically teleport themselves to your computer the moment you click on them. You're still going to be waiting for your download, and that's still going to take a bit, even on a fast connection. Unless you are in the habit of staring at the download progress, which, incidentally, makes it go slower, you're going to wander off and do something else anyway. Speed has thus become largely irrelevant. You queue it, you forget about it for a bit and check back later.
J_C said:
You can hate Steam as you want, but saying that using torrents is faster and more convenient is bullshit.
No. No, it isn't. Torrents let you acquire your goods in a secure and anonymous manner, much like going to an actual store, but without the hassles of having to dodge gunfire and psychos with knives on your way there. To do the same thing in Steam requires that you engage in a lengthy mirror dance which ends up taking you to a store to acquire some kind of prepaid card that you can use on the Internet...and frankly, I don't trust those that much either, since surely they know where those things WENT, so at minimum, they can find your general location, unless you travel a very long distance to acquire one.