Mods like Counter-Strike kept HL alive, not HLDM.
I would say the modifications didn't keep Half-Life alive. I would have
to go more on the marketing side of things. For example, alot of people
only bought Half-Life because it was in the Generation Pack.
At that time Counter-Strike could be purchased or downloaded freely,
although there was a sharp increase in sales for Half-Life related
products. Lower bandwidth customers (such as I) would not have
benefitted from purchasing Counter-Strike, simply because you had to
patch the game up with a big 60Meg patch (of which was about 3/4 the
size of the free download) and higher bandwidth customers just
downloaded the modification.
This is leading me to believe that unless you were a total fanboy you
would have just downloaded Counter-Strike. Although undeniably alot of
people did just buy Half-Life on its own around the time CS v1 came
out. Although a lot of people really didn't like what they got, which
started off the larger part of the WW2 modification community in the
Half-Life scene.
So anyways bit off topic there, I put down the success of Half-Life to
clever marketing schemes and the modification support and modification
communities. Not solely Counter-Strike.
