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Half-Life 2 Preloading from Steam: Part 2

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the teasing-us dept.

BrainsVolpe writes "For those of us on Steam, we can continue our 'preloading'of Half-Life 2. This time around we'll be downloading 'the majority of the audio of Half-Life 2 in encrypted form.' Does this mean we'll be getting HL2 before September 30th? Only Valve knows for sure... sorta."

3 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It is newsworthy NOT by atomicdragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think the current Slashdot quote has some relevance: "Dibble's First Law of Sociology: Some do, some don't."

    Some people have an interest in this stuff, others don't. It is much easier to skip over an article that doesn't interest you than to find ones that do interest you, but are not posted.

    I tend to think that if a topic is really that uninteresting, why bother with spending the time to read or to reply to the posts.

  2. Re:Who gets the money? by KDR_11k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Valve gets more from Steam, that's the reason they made it.
    I'd prefer incentives like a lower price or an earlier release if they wanted to convince me to get the game without any physical stuff and using my own bandwidth (it'd probably take a few days of my bandwidth to get the game...). And there are some people who pay for their traffic, I bet they'd like some more incentives, too.

    --
    Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
  3. Re:Why all the bashing? by ctr2sprt · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Easy enough. I do not trust Steam's "security" well enough to give it any sensitive information. Furthermore, I want a copy on a CD so that, if Steam breaks for whatever reason (which it likes to do), I can still install and play the game I bought.

    I have no objection to preloading per se. Well, it does use up my bandwidth, hard drive space, and CPU power for something which is going to remain useless for at least another month. But my main objections are security concerns and the lack of a CD image.

    Considering that I don't really gain anything from doing this, I'm not going to. I'll just go buy the game when it comes out, or a week later, or whatever. Any excitement I had for HL2 has been wiped out by Steam, the constant delays, and Valve's treatment of its paying customers. I think that's why you see all the bashing: people are pissed because they feel Valve are treating them like shit since they know we'll buy HL2 no matter what they do. It doesn't have anything to do with preloading, but anger will find expression where it will, not necessarily where it makes sense.