I think there are a lot of people who weren’t around for, or don’t remember, how buying digital titles was before Steam got quite so popular.

It was pretty rare, and the overwhelming majority of indie games were released for free. There just wasn’t many good ways to get the word out, and most ways of taking payment were costly enough to set up that it was rarely worth trying to get some meager amount of pay if you were just a one man show with no external financial backing.