I recently held my breath and reinstalled the Windows 7 Beta after Windows 7 killed itself a few months ago. I have also been installing a few games, namely Warcraft III, WoW, Portal, and Half-Life 2. And I haven't needed the CD to install any of them.
Steam allows you to re-download games in case of a situation just like mine - the system you play the game on kills itself and you want to play the game again, albeit with a different GUID on your partition. This got me thinking as to exactly how easy it was - I don't have to bother with any installers in Steam and the Blizzard installers just download themselves and zip along. This is the same magic as a Linux package manager, but as a store. The magic part of the commerce in the download service is that games are still bound to a key, which is bound to my account, which I use to play the games. As game downloads move further and game companies such as Valve build out their online services, the CD key may no longer be necessary, and games will only bind to the account. The concept of binding to an account is not an alien one, evidenced by iTunes. However, IDENTITY as an ownership model is beginning to replace a slip of paper on the inside of the box.
