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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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HL2 and Steam literally launched simultaneously.
The retail version of HL2 required you to log into Steam to activate it. It was a big deal at the time because lots of people's gaming PCs weren't hooked up to the internet at the time.
Lots of games of the time had verification processes along the lines of "look on page 48 of the manual, go down 6 lines and pick the 8th word" each time you started the game to verify that you had the disk and a copy of the manual - making piracy more inconvenient.
Games would even ship with red and black manuals that were more difficult to photocopy.
No, Steam existed for a while before HL2. It was used for Counter-Strike 1.5, over a year before HL2 came out. Its initial purpose was for anti-cheat and anti-piracy. There was no inclination to block secondary market sales there.
What you're describing there is anti-piracy mechanisms, not resale market blocking, which is indeed something Steam was built to tackle.