Barking at Ubisoft (while not unreasonable in 99% of the cases

) is wrong this time. 1C is the big proponent of STEAM and either Oleg or Ilya did drop hints a few weeks back that STEAM would be involved some way or another.
I'm somewhat ambivalent towards STEAM myself. I use it and never had issues, and quite frankly it made things a lot easier for me when I was seriously ill in 2008/2009 and only had a notebook to play with, but I also don't necessarily like having yet another software running in the background. I do not necessarily see advantages for CoD apart from the additional revenue for 1C, since I consider this "going online for playing offline" trend of late a major PITA of every honest customer.