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Half-Life 2 Going Gold on Monday? [updated]
Warrior-GS writes "According to GameSpy, Gabe Newell has announced that Half-Life 2 is going gold on Monday. Numerous retail outlets have Sept. 1 or Sept. 2 as a shelf-date for the game, so a gold announcement now seems to mean those dates are fairly close to reality." Given that HL2 is already available on Steam, this doesn't sound too far-fetched. Update: 08/28 19:27 GMT by T : Kraiger writes "According to HL2 Fallout the announcement of the futuristic FPS, "Half-Life 2", going Gold is a complete hoax! According to HL2 Fallout, the announcement from Gabe Newell, a Valve Software employee, was created by someone who was able to guess the simple password of "gaben" for Gabe's forum account."
Probably. What personal information (apart from your email address) has Steam taken? What personal details did you have to give up to install Steam? Answer: Nothing!
I have to go now, I think Doom3 is stealing my credit card numbers...
If Valve would just give a simple update on the release time-frame, they could avoid sending their POTENTIAL customers into fits again. They left the door wide open for a hoax like this by starting the pre-loading without any direction as to when people will be able to play. Now I am going to have a new(well it was new a year ago) graphics card AND a gigabyte of data wasting away on my PC.
I guesss I'll be putting my $50USD into DOOM3. I'll see you in the dark!
The Fat Man Walks Alone
The OP is talking about an in intrusion into his computer activity, not necessarily his privacy. (Although it does associate specific computer activity with an email address and IP address, which should be cause for concnern...) In this regard, Steam is extremely intrusive: It requires you to authenticate yourself to the game's manufacturer every time you start the game.
I've never seen such a thing with *any* retail application. Even XP only makes you do this when you first install it, not every time you fire it up.