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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."
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.
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.
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.