Obviously. The point was that earnings from half-life were effectively the stand-in for investor capital. And I'd wager that even with all that money, or ten times as much, Steam would not have been able to establish itself without hl2 as a tool/vector. It's been almost two decades that we haven't seen a single steam copycat that did not try to ride a flagship game release in exactly the same way (unless you consider GoG or humble as steam copycats, or Playstore and whatever itms is called these days)
