Steam is the program that the company valve uses to sell games. Its their game client. Valve sells games through steam and hosts other 3rd party games that valve agree to put on steam and sell. Steam also lets all the games, cs, cs sourse, half life, dof, everything go under 1 folder, the valve steam folder w/e and 1 client. So yeah, i no many people hate it, but i think its a lot easier than having 8 game icons from steam where u can just get it from a simple window. I dont no about steam taking 2 minutes to load, takes like 30 seconds for me. Mayb u comp. is effed up and slow. I dk, but i like steam. Its a good way to organize the games and mod em. Steam is the big chunk of the money valve gets, so dont go off naggin about it. Hope this explains it well.