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Half-Life 2 'Interview' - False Activation Claims?
An anonymous reader writes "According to a mini-interview with Valve's Gabe Newell at Nerdsahoy.com, Half-Life 2 will use a form of online product activation to prevent more than one install per copy." Newell also allegedly comments on distribution, saying "...our marketing will mostly lean towards [Valve's online 'content delivery system'] Steam as the method of acquiring the game." Update: 09/02 14:34 GMT by S : Unfortunately, many signs point towards this being a fake, fabricated interview.
Guess what happens when their "STEAM" content delivery system suddenly has HalfLife 2 available.
CRUNCH. No more Steam Content servers.
They say they have 1.8Gbps bandwidth, but a mere 3345 people used 1.3Gbps when the RedHat ISOs were released on BitTorrent. Centralised content distribution like Steam is simply not going to be able to handle the load for the size of files they're going to be throwing around.
Without some decentralised P2P file downloading action it's about as bright an idea as their "Powerplay" initiative (and look how that turned out).
Small error there. You need a valid CDKey to use the Sierra Update to download patches. Anyone can go to http://www.planethalflife.com/ and download patches and mods to their hearts content.
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
If the activation would allow me to install it in two places, so long as I only ran it in one place at a time (and even if it required me to be connected to the internet - I'm used to that for massively multiplayer games) that would be acceptable to me.
IIRC, that's allowed. Now this is all based on the reading of one thread on the HL2 forums, but in there Gabe Newell states that you can play from a friend's house using your CD key, even without them having bought the game. Better yet, your key bindings and other settings will follow you (although I'd hope they leave the hardware specific stuff up to each install for obvious reasons).
Oh... and upon reading that thread, the latest information from Gabe is that the interview is a fake.
I'd still recommend reading through that thread if you haven't before. Yes it's long. It's also responses from HL2 developers only (and the mods keep it cleaned up too).
Valve have never previously mentioned product activation in any of the genuine interviews.
Seems most games these days tend to work with a CD key which appears valid for offline gaming but have slightly better controls to check authenticity when playing online. It's widely known that Steam will be used for HL2 multiplayer, this seems to allow one CD Key per account, but from what we've seen so far there are no controls on where you install the game. We've yet to see anything mentioning Steam being required for offline play (unless HL2 is purchased via Steam).
What seems to be more worrying are rumours that HL2 multiplayer will be Pay 2 Play which have appeared on a few HL2 sites. If this does happen, Valve could give HL2 away for free and charge us to play all the currently mod's that are so popular with Half-Life
http://nerdsahoy.com/articles/view.php?articleID=1 66