Quote Originally Posted by randomizer View Post
Of course there's a benefit. It stops piracy. People only pirate games that they actually have a reason for playing.
Well, no actually. I canceled my pre-order and I will be downloading a pirated version to play the single player now. And I intend to hand out free copies to all my friends and tell them not to buy it.

And there will likely be a good player base for the pirated version. Pirates can only play on other pirate servers, and if you look at FEAR 2, another fully Steam integrated game with no dedicated server, a majority of servers are pirated.