Wine + Steam = Good

This thread summarizes why I prefer to purchase and use games via Steam on my Mac and Linux boxes. Not only do you avoid shady patches and other questionable (legal and moral) practices, you also are providing a more predictable experience. In general Steam locks the version and patches that everyone uses forcing the application to become a constant. This means testers A, B, and C are testing the same application version on variable distributions and hardware. Furthermore, users A, B, and C will likely end up using the exact application that was tested significantly increasing the possibility of a similar experience.

Without Steam, or some other forcing function that locks application versions, testing becomes far more complex and it is harder to guarantee an acceptable user experience. In the PC (a Mac is still a PC) world and the world of Wine there are already far to many variable frames, fixing even one of them is a godsend. I would even go so far as advocating that Codeweavers focus their testing and support on the versions of games available on Steam over other variable sources. (In theory those variable sources can patch their versions to the same versions distributed via Steam...)

My £0.02