Valve are cool. Valve are a company that encourage indie developers and mod communities. Its run by guys who care, who talk to their community. Simple as that.
Steam is massively better than it was a year ago, and even back then it was never a problem for me. Yes, some had problems, but a LOT of it was whiney kids who couldn't wait a few minutes for updates or content unlocking... I've had steam installed almost since day 1 and i have bought all the games apart from RDKF (which i will get soon). I'll buy Darwinia again too, just to have it in my steam list, although i'd really prefer IV or Valve to come up with a way of importing my original game installation. Steam DID do this with Half Life 1. It detected it was installed and imported all the files in. Downloaded a few extras, bundled it into the gcf files and there you have it... Anyway, thats not likely to happen with Darwinia, so be it. My point is, Steam is not as bad as people make out, and its far better now than it was.
Steam is almost as common as Windows on gamers desktops these days. Who hasn't bought HL2 or in the past had Half Life 1 or CounterStrike installed with it ?? (No need to answer this thanks, its theoretical) This means IV and Darwinia will hit millions of users desktops, and sales will rocket. Absolutely great for IV and i'm very happy about that. This crew and game deserve it...
Anyway, i know i'm kinda re-iterating a lot of what others have said, so i'll get to my query in all of this
Mods, current ones and future ones. How will they be handled within Steam ? I'm sure installing them manually (like now) will be fine, but will the current ones work in this new Steam version. Will future mod releases made via the Steam version work for our older retail versions ? I really do hope so as the huge leap in userbase is gonna mean more mods to play in the end...
Congrats to IV on a fine game and all the best for the Steam release