You mean GameSpy? Yes, that merged with IGN and subsequently went into oblivion.

They did own Direct2Drive to buy, download, and (manually) install games, FilePlanet to (manually) update games and download demos, and GameSpy to chat with friends and find multiplayer servers. That covers most of Steam's functionality, I guess.

But it was all spread out and I don't think they ever made any moves towards trying to pull it all together into a single offering. It was just a bunch of separate websites / programs that happened to be owned by a common parent company. Which might be a good sign for Humble's continuing independence, if IGN is still running things the same way (but OTOH, all of those separate sites eventually just withered and died under IGN's ownership).

I don't think so. Pretty sure IGN was still a vaguely independent-ish (or at least not owned by any specificly video game concerned parent company) reviewing site between the launch of Steam until it's inescapable crowning as the default bway to buy games.