> I love HL, and if I could get hold of it without Steam, I'd have it, but I don't know of a way to do that, and I've lost the copy I originally bought because leaving Steam meant loosing everything.
(Used) physical copies are still reasonably available. For Half-Life 1 those should all be pre-Steam AFAIK. The high seas are also always an option - don't let others' morals stop you from preserving your childhood memories.
Also while I don't mean to be uncritical of Steam and Valve, loosing access to your games sounds highly unusual. Did they actually take your stuff or are you simply choosing not to use Steam? If its the latter and you still have a working login, then you could download your Games using Steam, steamcmd [0] or reverse engineered downloaders [1] and play them forever using the Goldberg Emulator [2] instead of Steam.
(Used) physical copies are still reasonably available. For Half-Life 1 those should all be pre-Steam AFAIK. The high seas are also always an option - don't let others' morals stop you from preserving your childhood memories.
Also while I don't mean to be uncritical of Steam and Valve, loosing access to your games sounds highly unusual. Did they actually take your stuff or are you simply choosing not to use Steam? If its the latter and you still have a working login, then you could download your Games using Steam, steamcmd [0] or reverse engineered downloaders [1] and play them forever using the Goldberg Emulator [2] instead of Steam.
[0] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD
[1] https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader
[2] https://mr_goldberg.gitlab.io/goldberg_emulator/