Marketing becomes Steam Powered

Hi guys,
Recently, in the e-marketing world I've noticed the rise of the digital remote distribution service program Steam (you can find the link to their homepage here http://store.steampowered.com/). Essentially, Steam provides gamers the opportunity to purchase and remotely download games from Steam servers without having to leave the comfort of your own home. in marketing terms this provides the opportunity for Steams parent company valve, who offer their own games through the program, as well as a host of other game creating titans such as Bioware and Infinityward as well as more emerging gaming companies seeking customer awareness, to effectively "skip out" on distribution and packaging costs whilst providing a remote one-stop shop for a PC gamers needs. As a direct result of this, more real PC stores are becoming increasingly isolated from the gaming community who prefer the seemingly random and endless sales promotions (such as the aptly named and regularly featured "midweek madness") on the Steam website  as well as the accessibility it they offer. In fact it is my prediction, that Steam will continue to grow as more game developers realise the potential to directly cater to their target audience, rather than continually packaging, distributing and stocking games to real life games stores like EB games. This however gives rise to the importance of Internet security and infrastructure both of which are central to the success of any Internet marketing endeavour (particularly in an industry with customers as demanding as the gaming one). looking back on the events this year which saw Playstations online network go down as a result of the newly coined phrase "Internet terrorism" resulting in the loss of many of Playstations customers personal credit information and much frustration for PlayStation 3 players worldwide. The network was inaccessible for a month causing a high amount of damage to Sony's brand name and high a high amount of switching from customers to their direct rival Xbox in their eagerness to play online games. Personally, I think that particularly in the gaming community, we will continue to see more games marketed and distributed from remote online programs such as steam, and we will slowly see that real gaming stores (EB, Gamespot ect...) will go the way of the dinosaurs. what do you guys think?
Cheers
Jerry