*nods*
Windows live has been reason enough for me not to buy one game or another. It always means you have fucked up control style menus (No, you can't change that in the settings) with little no mouse support. No private servers and stuck with a sucky matchmaking thing. In game controls are limited to a controller set.
So it basically screams "Cheap ass console game port".
I don't like consoles. I don't like controllers.
As for steam... well, I love the discounts when they have them, which is the only reason I buy steam games. The rest is pathetic. Their vac policy is fucked up, the fact you can lose hundreds of dollars worth of games all at the same time is very very fucked up, Offline mode being less than practical is also crappy. If your internet is being bad at the moment steam is also horribly fucked up. If their servers are busy, you also can't play games. The fact it downloads over 6-10mbs of whatever before you play any game (sometimes it doesn't, but always does it at least once when you started it up) is also very fucking annoying, specially on a bad internet day. Not being able to say no to patches is fucked up as well. From personal experience, the support is very slow and very retarded, they never admit its their fault (I reported a bug with steam, they pointed me to a flag in a game, which has nothing to do with steam, then to drivers that have nothing to do with my computer. I replied saying that the drivers weren't for my mother board and the problem was with steam code. Haven't heard from them in 2 months).
And so on and on.
It's basically a very crappy service with a lot of liabilities on the customer side and some awesome cheap promotions now and then.