STEAM as in the top successful E-Commerce ever.

[minh-le]

Recently, my university project is about introducing a successful E-Commerce company. My first thought was Steam, not Amazon nor eBay.
To make it short before going further into details, our team will present about Steam in front of 2 professors (major in BA) and at least 40 students (which are completely unfamiliar to Steam service). So I would love to gather as much information as possible about Steam. It's time to show your love and knowledge for Steam !
P.S : If there is any moderator out there happens to read this. I would love to have a verified source so I can introduce Steam to my community.

Details (Warning : wall of text and may kill you out of boredom)

There are many information needed but I want to stress on the part that make Steam becomes one of the most successful E-Commerce company ever (in game industry alone, I don't think anything can beat steam in the next 50 years) !
- Steam price policy (something like this): http://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell/
- Steam well known promotion : such as Summer Sale, Weekend
- Steam impacts on piracy, users, gamers, developers
(Greenlight is a perfect example, yet I want to know more, even personal opinions count- how ever reflect to forum rules before you post since this is a sensitive topics.)
- Steam system, way of delivery the products.
( Maybe your own experience in purchasing, the process, how good it is, what is the flaw, what can be improved. I have never been able to buy anything on Steam due to the feeling of insecurity when using credit card, this is major problems in my country as well, we prefer redeem card over credit card)
- Steam user service (Steam let's you pick what game will appear, anything else beside that ?)

(
The projects will be presented around next year, in Spring. Mean time, I will do my best to read all your post, sampling data, response to your kindness and hopefully finding something in Google (which cause major problems as source and citations are not well checked.)

Thanks in advance :D

[Tusken GA]

To be honest a forum is really not a respectable source. Unless you intended to use us to do your research for you, in which case that's not really how college works.

[minh-le]

This is more like a survey, in which can only be done by using community. All other information is already available on wiki, internet, google (with and without validate confirmation) -_-

[CloneZZ]

I just want to give some input regarding steam impact on piracy. I am 38 years old hard core gamer, been playing since the day of the first Atari. Since the advent of piracy with SNES I probably can count the number of original game that I bought with my hands. The reason is a mixture of unavailablilty of original games in my country and price. Now with Steam and GOG, I owned 200 over original games. 99% from Steam sales, now I always check everyday looking for new sales on games old and new.