I think you're mixing up a few things about the 'sentiment' here because of the timelines. If Wikipedia is correct enough Steam launched in autumn 2003 and as y

I think you're mixing up a few things about the 'sentiment' here because of the timelines. If Wikipedia is correct enough Steam launched in autumn 2003 and as you say, for CS. All of us who didn't play CS did not care at all about Steam. Then late in 2004 HL2 came, that was a bigger draw but still, for many of us who didn't buy it.. don't care. My Steam account is from 2009, but I distinctly remember that I tried to sign up some years before for no good reason (maybe to grab a name) and couldn't get past the unreadable Captcha and because I STILL had no pressing reason (around 2006?) I let it go. I'm not saying I'm a hardcore Steam user, maybe more like a casual user who buys some games from time to time and I didn't feel a pressing need to sign up for the first ~6 years of service and at some point they had enough benefits that people signed up and bought games. TLDR: Steam was a niche product for many years so the current discourse about "the default game purchasing platform" is completely different than "publisher-owned distribution platform for 3 games"