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Half-Life 2 Delayed Following Code Leak
jhol writes "CNN is reporting that Half-Life 2 is delayed "by at least four months, that is to April 2004.", due to the code leak. VU Games has already suffered a 29% fall in revenue and an operating loss of $61.36 million this year. A Christmas release of Half-Life 2 would probably have been most welcomed." Update: 10/07 20:38 GMT by S : CNN Money are now reporting there's a newly public leak, allegedly involving a partially playable, Beta pre-release of the game.
I just have to wonder if a serious delay was in the works anyway and the code theft gave Valve a publicly acceptable reason.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
Are you serious? How much money do you think Valve makes off of the sale of a game? How many MILLIONS?
Do you HONESTLY think that they would even make 1/10 of that solicting for donations from the good of one's heart?
How much money do you think cdex + xiph + bittorrent + scorched3d + blender + tons o' other donation-based projects get per year? Answer) A mere fraction of a fraction of a fraction as much as Valve does.
I would submit it as a story, but someone else probably has, and I've never had a story accepted yet :)
The NFO was on nforce.nl for a short time, but has since been removed. The leak has been confirmed here, and a few claim to have it (but they could be lying).
I've also seen a screenshot of the folders with all the map files in it, and the names look very much like what one would expect the long gameplay demo to be made from.
Not good news for valve :( I am disappointed that the game had to be delayed - and for all of you who have taken the source or download the beta, I hope you remember your duty to purchase the game when it does come out.
Yeah, or they could consider free copying of the games as promotion for their concerts, where they make the real money.
When will Slashdot users grow up?
Games, movies, and even songs from the Backstreet Boys cost huge amounts of money to produce. You will be charged for copies, one way or another.
If people can't figure out how to slow down this ridiculous level of IP theft pretty damn soon, I guarantee you that we will have DRM shoved down our throats. In this case already, the delay of several months is probably to put in place with is effectively DRM, in order to cut down on multiplayer cheats.
He wasn't that stupid. The email used a old buffer overflow bug in the preview pane of Outlook to install the program, Gabe just had to click(not even open) the email for it to install the trojan.
However, it's mind-bending that their Outlook weren't patched(it's a very old exploit) and that he uses the preview pane in Outlook, on his work related computer. I know that they are backed by Microsoft, and thus probably gets all the MS toys, but they still forgot to patch them.
A shame. Still, a custom written trojan made against Valve to target their system and get the code/data of the game isn't something you see everyday. Either this kind of thing doesn't happen often, or it happens often but it's never detected(or acknowledged). Think industrial espionnage. Either way, it's not an easy to spot/cure, not antivirus/firewall can detect it effectivly if it's custom written against you. They probably probed Valve to check what exploits would or wouldn't work, so it's not as easy as to say: they should have patched, because the hacker would probably have tried another way and with a little determination, would have still compromised their systems enough to get some data.
See the story at The Register. They link to Valve's forum, where the general manager details how the code was leaked: in short, his own account information was stolen via Outlook, then several other employees were hit with a Outlook preview-pane virus that installed a keylogger.
Of course, this is no reason to think that Outlook isn't a perfectly good solution for email. Outlook is great. There's no reason to consider any alternatives. No matter how much money you lose to Outlook virii, simply look at the silly dancing monkey!
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Vivendi Universal Says Delay Not Confirmed
Tuesday, October 7, 2003
According to a news article posted today on a UK press release, there is a Half-Life 2 delay. We already know that Valve does is not mentioning a delay.
We received an email from Mike Thompson who says he works for Vivendi Universal and writes:
quote: "delay is not confirmed..."
Here we go around and around... again...
From Half-Life Source Dot Com
When will Slashdot users grow up?
When people realize that when one slashdot user speaks, he doesn't speak for all slashdot users.
You know the Duke Nukem developers are kicking themselves, saying "Why didn't we think of that."
cat