Gabe Newell pushed the vision of steam onto the gaming market with brute force. You couldnt play the highly acclaimed HalfLife2 without Steam.
Many people hated it back in the day and were complaining aloud on internet forums.
10 years later it proves to be the right decision and shows that not always is listening to your customers need the best way to build a successfull business. The people back then didnt know they want it, just like Dropbox or the iPhone.
I think what you're saying is a little misleading. The complaints weren't that we didn't want something like what Steam is now, it's that we didn't want something like what Steam was then. It was a small Valve-only HL/mod manager with a server finder and a friend list. It broke all the time, had major features that didn't work for years, and required you to be online because offline mode was one of those features. It was a broken pile of garbage that needed to be thrown away and completely re-built from the ground up.
The Steam you use today is to that version of Steam as IE10 is to IE3, approximately. It was lacking major features -- working chat, overlay, store, non-steam game support, offline mode, authentication that didn't fail 70% of the time forcing you to restart Steam then try to play your game again, etc.
It's useful and a value add these days, it was just a gigantic nightmare before.
But I'm still very disappointed that the best (only? I don't count Origin) tool like Steam is Steam. By that I mean that we're locked into what Valve wants to do, which is sell us limited licenses that are tied to Valve maintaining their service, significant amounts of DRM, and other anti-consumer policies like no refunds. Some of these are deal breakers that leave significant room for a competitor to eat all of Valve's lunch, so I suspect if Valve doesn't buck up and play nice with its customers that eventually someone will.
