How early was this? My intro to Steam was via the Orange Box, which I bought from a physical store. I don't remember if Steam was mandatory for them. Either wa

How early was this? My intro to Steam was via the Orange Box, which I bought from a physical store. I don't remember if Steam was mandatory for them. Either way, CD keys used to be totally shareable, before online DRM really kicked off. You could just copy the one you got, and let someone else use it to install the game. A downside I faced was when my CD for a game stopped working, and I had to buy the game all over again to get a new CD + key. Either key would work during the install, but I didn't have the option of just downloading the installation media, so I had to pay up. The other time I saw this backfire was in a (temporary) LAN setting with COD4:MW. There were only so many CD keys, and you wouldn't be able to join a game where 'your' key was already active. Otherwise, it was fully-featured and fully usable!