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Half-Life 2 'Interview' - False Activation Claims?

Posted by simoniker on from the have-people-nothing-better-to-do? dept.

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.

9 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. That will obviously help reduce piracy by Soul-Burn666 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "it uses a system much like Windows XP"

    Newsflash: 20 days before the official release date of WinXP, a no-activation version was already installed in millions of PC worldwide.

    Maybe they could decrease the number of online gamers, even that was proven impossible. A huge percentage of online HL gamers use a pirated copy and a CDKey "they got from a friend".

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    ^_^
    1. Re:That will obviously help reduce piracy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I doubt that Half Life 2 will have a corporate version ;)

  2. And we've seen how effective that is... by Ceyan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why do companies continue to insist on spending more and more resources on copy protection?

    A) It's been proven ineffective, everything from the first disc-copy protection format to activation has been proven to be worthless. About the only thing left to try is hardware DRM, but even that's not fool-proof (X-Box).

    B) If anyone is willing to go through the effort to search, or learn, how to copy games they'll find a way to do it. Those that don't bother with passing copy protection either don't buy the game or will be turned aside by anything beyond a key code.

  3. Sell your stock now by Kris_J · · Score: 4, Insightful
    If there's anything that is a better indicator of declining profits than investment in product activation and/or DRM, I haven't met it yet. They're also a good indicator that:
    • The current management don't have a clue about the business, and
    • There are no innovative people left in the company.
    Obviously a really large business is not a coheasive blob and some sections may still be doing a good job, but it does tend to indicate that the person with the reigns doesn't have a clue where they're going.
  4. HAHAHAHAHA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

  5. So... by Fweeky · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... pirates get to wait an extra couple of hours for a crack, and paying users get yet another annoying "protection" to get in their way. Yet again, those who aren't paying are getting a *better* product (no faffing about keeping the CD in the drive, no mandatory registration) than those who are. That's great! No, really...

    Are they at least going to offset the annoyance factor by forgoing the CD checks? I have 300GB of disk space - I don't want to have to screw about hunting for a disk I can't copy properly which should be in storage somewhere safe.

    Screw Steam too; post it to Usenet and P2P, and give me a way of buying a cheap license which factors in the fact that I didn't cost anything to distribute the game to. It's going to appear there anyway; it might as well do so legitimately.

  6. I think it's working well. by Inoshiro · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "About the only thing left to try is hardware DRM, but even that's not fool-proof (X-Box)."

    Xbox Live! service + XBox hardware = no mods, no cheaters. There's the odd bugged game that can be used in various evil ways, but the actual combination of a locked-hardware set and a locked-network is fairly strong.

    Sure, you could possibly crack it, but it's so improbable as to be impossible.

    --
    --
    Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
    1. Re:I think it's working well. by Golias · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Actually, the more popular mod chip designs have a toggle switch on them so you can switch them to look "unmodded" to the X-Box Live server, and use all the hacks when in stand-alone mode.

      Now that Live has been up for a while, it's probably just a matter of time before X-Box hackers learn what Live is looking for to confirm it's legit, and come up with a mod chip that spoofs that.

      --

      Information wants to be anthropomorphized.

  7. Anyone else figure... by Drakin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That the source is kinda dodgy? As one AC mentioned, it's not a site anybody's really heard about, and it was submitted anonymously. Combine this with the way it reads. While Mr. Newell often made amusing responces to questions, they tend to at least have more humour than what was found in this interview. Not to mention the way the questions were posed. 8/27/03 Interview with Mr Newell for comparison