I did sign up for a month, just before I decided to stop buying so many games, so didn't buy anything at GG in the couple of months until they cancelled that discount. So I missed out on it.

The thing about an IGN subscription is, it never ends. I don't know what the deal is with their system, but after that month it continued, and I alerted them to the issue and they gave me another couple of complimentary months, which have run out since then, but the sub still hasn't ended.

Anyway, I think it was still worth it. I got quite a few indie games for those $7.

Probably true in the long run as it helps keep the Steam userbase large, but not directly since Steam keys don't bring any direct profit to Steam, they're free to developers that use Steamworks.

I'm not sure they had much of a choice. Remember the great MW2 boycott? Gamersgate is the sole participating DD that's still under the same ownership. :(

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/11/06/digi-retailers-drop-modern-warfare-2/

Edit:
bansama says GG never sold Activision titles... I'm less impressed with their participation. XD

You should note though that GG have never sold Activision titles. They only sell the Mac versions which are not published by Activision.

As far as I remember you could not install the first retail version (single player as well) without Steam, and later they removed the Steam requirement for the single player part. I got only 1 key for Dark Messiah for the retail copy and that activated both the single and multi player parts on my Steam account.

Unfortunately the trick doesn't work with certain game. My Hearts of Iron III Collection failed to complete the installation if i'm running the setup.exe directly, not from the Gamers Gate own launcher.

I hate the name 'Gamersgate' either sounds really twee, like its at the bottom of Gamerscottagegarden or like its a tabloid nickname for some Gamer related political scandal!
Rubbish!

Actually i kinda prefer it over Steam for non-Steamworks game. Because sometime, Steam fail to load or takes too much time to load on my system.

Depends on the game. I've seen a few games that give you the choice between Steam and Tages (some still have Tages even on Steam) and I refuse to put Tages on my computer. I got over my fear of SecuROM because it's so widespread but Tages...I still am not over my fear of Tages.

Oh yes, because it's a totally GREAT idea to ignore all the Steamworks games out there, especially when the best selling games use Steamworks (COD, Borderlands 2, Skyrim, Dishonored and the list goes on). You're a fucking genious, i'm impressed.

*looks at his copy of Rage, purchased in GameStop, containing 3 coasters and a steam code* Too late.
But if you don't want to go physically to GameStop, stop on over at Impulsedriven.com, now
owned by GameStop. Looking at the 6 titles featured on the front page at the moment (for me) is
Lotro Mitrhil. Civ V (steam), Torchlight II (steam), Far cry 3, Empire Total war (steam), and
Arma II.
Personally I don't have a problem getting a steam code though I'd much prefer DRM free, or both
(as is the case with a bunch of things bought through the Humble Store) Then again I seem to have
accounts various places around. And I think I'd prefer a steam code rather than some of the
other clients. At least it's a single client to open to update my stuff rather than having to
poke Gamestop, Desura and GameFly just to see if there's updates to the games I have (or logging
into Gamersgate/gog to check if a game has a newer version available). It's a convenience
thing, but I'd gladly manually update if the thing is DRM free (Though the Witcher 2's update
made me reach for the uninstaller rather than wait for the update)

Steam do not get a single cent from keys sold on third party sites. All the revenue goes to the seller and to the distributor. In a way you could actually say that Steam will loose money from each steam key sold outside of steam, as they still will need to provide the bandwidth and hosting. Ergo - if you want to bankrupt Valve, buy as many steam keys as possible on third party sites and hand out the keys.