The latest from the rumor mill is that Ubisoft might consider developing an electronic distribution platform similar to Steam. That is hardly surprising since in addition to Valve's well-established system, which also delivers products from third-party publishers, Electronic Arts also has its Downloader. That would be good news to anyone who is concerned about the potential side effects of the Starforce copy protection scheme even though such a long-term initiative would be completed long after the release of Heroes of Might and Magic V.

Steam was also the source of numerous complaints a year ago, when Half-Life 2 was released. The fact that players were required to log on to Steam to play even the single-player version of the game, which was already an annoyance to dial-up users, became very frustrating when the server could not handle the traffic following the game's release. But Steam has also several advantages: for instance, you can quickly install and play games on multiple computers without carrying disks around. I'm curious to see if Heroes players think an electronic distribution platform would be an interesting alternative to a driver-based protection.