cartman

1) When you purchase a game, lets say HL2, from Steam, can you install it on multiple machines (such as both my desktop and laptop)? What if you get an entirely new machine, and want it on there since you have given away the old one?

2) Is there a way to see how much the different HL2 "packages" are without installing steam?

3) If the answer to #1 is "no", why in the sam hill would anyone choose to purchase the game via steam instead of getting a hard copy from retail? When reinstalling, you have to wait for the multi-gigs of data to redownload, yes?

flashburn

1. As far as I can tell it is just tied into your account, so it isn't a problem having it on multiple machines and using the same account.

2. I don't really understand your question. Is it referring to the price? They haven't announced pricing on the different packages. If it is referring to the pre-loads, they only include the bare minimum for all of the packages (HL2 + CS: Source assets).

3. You can always burn your Steam data to a dvd if you don't want to redownload 3+ gigs.