I wasn't a hater of Steam, but I did hate it being forced on the CS community as well as the news that it would be required for HL2. At the time I had dialup.

I wasn't a hater of Steam, but I did hate it being forced on the CS community as well as the news that it would be required for HL2. At the time I had dialup. Patching on Valve's schedule simply did not work for me. Patching most games at that point was a multi-stage process involving resume-capable download managers and setting my PC to automatically get online and start downloading at night. I will say that even those who had broadband did have legitimate grievances. Any kind of background process mattered a lot more back then, and Steam was not particularly light weight thanks in part to its use of a custom UI framework. I also don't recall it being particularly stable early on, nor the servers being able to hold up too well under load as demonstrated almost immediately by the HL2 launch. Neither insurmountable and both in fact surmounted within a few years, but again it was being forced on an existing community. Had it been optional for CS it still would have had a rough start with HL2 and a lot of gripes from that community but I think it wouldn't have been hated as hard as what resulted from forcing it on CS players.