That just reinforces my argument, and it sounds like we finally agree: You don't need Steam or Valve to make a financially successful game. You need an audience. Steam provides a big one, but you can absolutely garner that audience outside of Steam and the examples I provided are proof of that.

Plenty of studios and developers build that audience outside of Steam using the massive swathe of social media outlets to this day. Hypixel was/is a massive Minecraft server with a huge number of daily players and their growth in popularity was mostly through forums, and later Discord. Minecraft itself started with forum posts and grew purely through word of mouth. Dwarf Fortress was free for a very long time and lived purely off donations before it eventually came to Steam after it already had a massive audience. None of them had any base to speak of from the start. They built those audiences and none of that build up happened through Steam.

The reason I'm even bothering is because people newer to game dev read threads like this. Tell them "Steam is required" and they don't try anything else. Then the lack of success stories gets used as proof that Steam is required even when it's not. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it's wrong.