Half-Life Games Make Steam Compulsory

Thanks to PlanetHalfLife for clarifying that you will soon need Valve's Steam technology installed to play any Half-Life engine title online. According to the site, "...sometime in the near future, Valve will be releasing an update to Half-Life that will require you to convert your old WonID CD-Key into a SteamID", and Valve's Erik Johnson explains this means "...you'll have to have ['digital content platform'] Steam installed to play the most current version of Half-Life [online]." Although he clarifies that "...no, you do not have to pay for Steam", and PlanetHalfLife points out "you should still be able to play HL through third-party server browsers", this is still a major change for Half-Life engine games such as Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Day Of Defeat.

Comments

Re:This kind of SDK....

[g_lightyear]

Yes, but unless they open the source to the SDK, there's no way we can get the kind of cross-platform support we'd need to use it in, say, CrystalSpace. I've done some work to a VFS implementation that treats bits of the local filesystem as 'cache' and checks the contents of the remote server for updates for each file; and while this works in specific cases, it's not a replacement for a general updater for an application. Something like this would be a great boon to the open source dev community. But there's just no way I could consider it unless it's open-sourced at the SDK level, and not just an open API. That would kill off their commercial ideas, unfortunately, IMO, and as such, I doubt they'll do it. Hopefully, though, it'll spur someone else into doing the job.