other companies? Are you a company? Or did you mean piracy is bad for ALL companies.

And onyxmeth, you're playing too much on the piracy bit and not enough on the Steam and digital disttribution bit.  Yeah piracy is hurting retail sales, but I'm guessing Steam is hurting them even more.

Which is fine with me, the more on Steam the better.

most retailers and e-tailers will always be cheaper than buying games on Steam.
COD 4 is like 33$ on gogamer
http://www.gogamer.com/viewproduct.htm?productId=26981885
And Amazon UK has it @ 29.99$.
Steam is okay if you want instant gratification. Games preload before they are released, auto patching etc ..
But if you are buying a 2-3 month old game on steam, it would be cheaper to check out your disc based versions on brick&mortal / online stores.

Some of the full priced games on steam are available for as little as 5$ in bargain bins.

Steam is bypassing a lot of middlemen, but they need to forward some of those savings to consumers.

I have never bought a game over steam before. When I pay I like to have a copy. But to pay for downloads? I can download for free I do not have that moral issue. If I download from steam and delete the game can I download again for free?

It's not just a moral issue, it's a legal issue.

A) You can download the Steam game onto as many computers as you like, as many times as you want. All you do is login to your Steam account and install any game from your list of purchased games.

B) You can burn your games onto CDs or DVDs with Steam, so you can always have a hard copy.

I don't understand some people...you're paying for the legal rights to play the game...you're either buying a cardboard box and DVD or buying the rights for a digital copy. Does it not make sense that if you want to buy TF2, you can buy a retail copy or you can buy it over Steam...either way-
-you paid $30
-now you are playing TF2.

If you did not pay $30 and you downloaded the game for free, that's theft...you don't own sh*t, you just f*cking stole TF2. The game you are playing is not legal. Sure a retail DVD might feel more substantial to you, but for those of us that don't care about hard copies but PREFER to remain legal and f*cking SUPPORT the industry, we have no problem paying money for a digital copy.

A digital copy is much more convenient for me, because I never have to worry about losing or damaging a DVD, and if I am on some random computer and I didn't plan on playing a game, like at a LAN party or a friend's house, I can always get on Steam and download it within an hour.

edit: I guess I just don't understand some people's logic. Do you really care about your DVD? Do you really think it's worth $50? The convenience of Steam, and of course Steam's services with servers, auto updates, the Community features, etc FAR, FAR, FAR exceed the value of a cardboard box and a disc to me.

Almost all arguments for the PC industry dying and the pirates killing everything are based off NPD numbers or retail PC sales in general.

I don't know the exact Steam sales, but I do know that they're doing very well...well enough to pretty much ignore the retail market.

I don't think it's a major issue. Maybe the problem isn't piracy stealing retail sales, but not enough awareness and acceptance of Steam. Such as people like Yojimbo who didn't know that you can download games an infinite number of times and burn hard copies, etc.  A ton of people have no problem with iTunes, but for some reason buying a videogame digitally is a bigger problem to them.

What? ArenaNet just recently reached 5 million copies sold of the Guild Wars franchise, and they're currently developing Guild Wars 2. You're probably thinking of some other company.

@BenKenobi88: PC Digital distribution (not just Steam) is increasing and definitely stealing some sales from the retail market (and this trend will keep going for quite a while), however by itself I doubt it would make any impact. But if we add subscription-based PC games... There currently over 16 million active subscribers of MMO games. This means there's a good amount of players that barely invest on boxed PC games, and only pay their MMO subscriptions (I'd know, I was one of them). The Worldwide revenue of MMOs subscription is possibly twice as big as the US PC retail market. 

Yeah, I don't typically count subscription games though...that's like a whole different category.

Titan Quest didn't sell because it was a mediocre Diablo 2 clone.  Not because of piracy.  Most people didn't even know it existed.