Half-Life 2 Not On Xbox?

Thanks to Evil Avatar for pointing to a Puget Sound Business Journal story suggesting that Half-Life 2 may not come out for Xbox after all. This relatively obscure article has word from David Hufford of Microsoft that "As of now, Half-Life 2 is not going to be on the Xbox.. Valve is sending us mixed messages on that." Up to now, established sites such as Planet Half-Life have said of the sequel: "An Xbox port is very likely", but it looks like that may no longer be true. Update: 06/09 21:34 GMT by S : GameSpyDaily have got hold of Valve's Doug Lombardi, who is saying that Half-Life 2 is still planned for both PC and Xbox - it may be that either contract negotiations or simply misinformation is clouding the issue.

Comments

this, despite...

[Recoil_42]

..gabe newell casually talking about it, and confirming it? the article is also very ps2 biased; so i wouldnt be surprised if the author is just talking out of his ass...

Re:this, despite...

[simoniker]

It _is_ odd - I'd be inclined to dismiss the whole thing if it was just opinion - but the fact is, it appears to be a quote from a product manager at Microsoft saying that Half-Life 2 on Xbox isn't happening right now.

So I guess they may still be negotiating, and the Microsoft guy has phrased in badly, but unless the quote is made up or otherwise mangled, it seems the deal is less done that everybody thought. We'll see.

not a bad thing?

[Frizzled]

after what happened to HALO all i can say is "Whew!"

_f

Milking the cow?

[ziggles]

Maybe Valve realizes Microsoft will pay large sums of money to get a practically guarunteed hit game on the xbox.. so they're pretending to play hardball. They get a nice pile of cash for doing something they were probably going to do anyway.

Re:There's a very real limit

[Babbster]

[sarcasm]I must apologize. I didn't realize that you had worked on the AI, physics and environments for Half-Life 2.[/sarcasm]

Seriously, though, my main problem with your kind of speculation is, well, that it's speculation. You're looking at trailers/demos for an unfinished videogame and making assumptions about the code driving it. Not only that, but you're doing so in a way that demonstrates a clear bias against the Xbox.

I'm well aware that there a lot of people out there (and perhaps especially here on the /.) that don't like the Xbox - usually because of a hatred of Microsoft. That's fine and dandy with me. The problem is that too many of those people (including you) decide to argue against the console on the basis of speculation instead of facts. At the very least, you could wait until Valve tells us what the minimum PC system specs (on the box, as opposed to speculation on unfinished code) for Half-Life 2 will be. Your invective might then carry some weight.

Re:Half-Life is a 3D Video Game SDK - and a game t

[PainKilleR-CE]

That's not why it sold well initially. The reason it was immediately successful (and it was) was that it was an excellent single-player game.

It also received a significant sales boost because Valve bought the team that created the most popular Quake mod, Team Fortress (which surpassed QuakeDM in players long before Half-life came around, and surpassed many (if not most) of Quake2's multiplayer mods), and they had announced that TF2 would be either a mod or an expansion for Half-life. In the long run it didn't account for nearly as many sales as Counterstrike, but it certainly accounted for a significant number of the pre-orders and initial sales of the game. While many people liked the single player portion of Half-life, I did not, even though I own 3 copies of the game (pre-order, the 'everyone loves the single player I cant wait for the pre-order to get here even though its already shipped' purchase, and the one I got from Sierra for moderating their HL boards). It had some interesting elements to it, but overall was a simplistic puzzler with a first-person perspective. The story-line was definitely better than Quake, but the gameplay was mediocre.

Over time it has had longevity beyond that of most single-player first-person shooters because of modifications, but it would have been successful even if there had never been a single mod.

We'll never really know, because Valve hyped it from day one as a mod platform AND a strong single-player game. If it hadn't been hyped as a mod platform, we can't really say if it would've sold well or not. I certainly know that many people were severely pissed about the game's multiplayer performance upon release, and that for them the only thing that redeemed the game were the eventual patches to fix the multiplayer code (and I'm not talking about the much later releases that changed the network code significantly after TFC and CS had already been released).