What is Steam?
Steam is a platform for PC, Mac and linux games with over 100 million users and often well over 10 million online at any one time. They have the infrastructure to allow you to buy, download, install and update AccuRC at any time.
The steam client, a tiny piece of software that runs on your computer keeps AccuRC up to date with no need for you to interact with it and gives you a friends list, say you are using your PC and open the steam client, you see your friend is online, you can message him and say “hey lets fly together”.
It also saves all your settings to your account, install steam on another machine, login, it downloads accurc for you including all your saved settings.