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Half-Life 2 Preloading from Steam: Part 2
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."
I got the prompt to pre-load before, denied it to let the server load subside a bit and now I can't get it to ask me again. Now what?
Money for nothing, pix for free
It is cool that you can preload unreleased media in encrypted form, I like how they are doing this.
A bad joke would be that you preloaded thier source code a few months ago, but lets not go there.
I can't wait for a doom3 demo, let alone a half life 2 demo.
I am holding my breath for a Duke Nukem Forever (that is so true it isn't even funny)
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
It costs exactly nothing to preload. When the game is officially released, you pay Valve/VU (I think VU is their publisher anywayws) the same amount of money as you would for a box (blame the publishing contract), only you get it the second it's available instead of worrying about what store will have it when.
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.
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.
Valve starts to pre-load the Half-Life 2 Read Me file.
It's not encrypted (despite what they say), if you fire up GCFScape, you can open and extract all the files.
The true protection lies in that they aren't preloading Half-Life 2.gcf (the filename is in the ClientRegistry.blob file), which contains the client dlls, nor are they releasing the maps yet.
This was covered fairly well in the discussion of part one of the article - they are not releasing the full product, they are releasing most of it. They are holding back a small chunk (or maybe even a large chunk) of crucial files and presumably a key for after payment has been received.
If you do successfully hack it... you have a big pile of audio files and textures. Wheeee. Though I imagine some folks will try anyway.
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.