No Half-Life 2 on Steam?

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Posted by Zonk on Monday September 20, 2004 @09:29AM from the think-of-the-children dept.

Karl the Pagan writes "Following on the heels of a previous Steam-related story, Vivendi Universal may block Half-Life 2 distribution via Steam. Additional motions can be filed until November 18th, but since Sierra/VU have final QA approval on the HL2 gold is it possible they could delay the game until after the court decides on these motions?"

4 of 374 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

nope... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-20 09:32 · Score: 5, Informative

it's a court battle that won't even start before HL2 is released (if it's released soon...)...

Also, they've already said they are releasing it on Steam regardless of this case.

read here for more:
article on bluesnews.com
1. Re:nope... by Mark+Imbriaco · 2004-09-20 12:07 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  "Vivendi isn't concerned about losing one of if not THE biggest earners of their whole software line?"
  
  It's not like HL2 is the only iron that Vivendi has in the fire. Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft -- heck ALL the Blizzard games, the Empire Earth series, Tribes: Vengeance, and so on. There are literally dozens of titles, some of which have the potential to be bigger than HL. Sure, they don't want to lose the HL2 revenue, but it's hardly going to kill them if it happens.
  
  "I don't think I am wrong when I say Sierra exisits because of HL1."
  
  Sierra doesn't really exist anymore other than as a vague shadow of their former selves. Now they're simply a small vassal of Vivendi in the grand scheme of things. In fact, Vivendi closed down the former Sierra offices and killed Dynamix off a few months ago. All that's left of Sierra, really, is the name.
Re:Worth the wait. by dougmc · 2004-09-20 09:36 · Score: 4, Informative

Gives me more time to buy a new vid card...
Bit of trivia for you -- when Doom 3 came out, the local Frys (I'm in Austin, TX) completely ran out of video cards of all sorts over $50 within like two days. The shelves were bare, with only a few really old (not even coming close to meeting Doom 3's minimum requirements) video cards left.
Sort of amusing. I wonder if Id's getting a kickback from ATI, Nvidia, etc. :)
Re:Great news by snillfisk · 2004-09-20 10:56 · Score: 4, Informative

they're pissing on their feet though, with the hl key system horribly sucking too(it's not really that uncommon that you lose your key to someone running some keygen, leading into some major suckery to get it back, in some cases people have bought the game still in wrappers and went home for some cs and noticed that the key was already in use).

The serial code for Half-Life is 14 digits, meaning a total of 289.254.654.976 possible combinations.. giving that the game has sold something like 20 million copies, that would turn out to try at least 20.000 keys before hitting one successful.. and as far as i know, no key generators checked with the WON network, so you'd just have to try (and that takes at least 15 seconds)..

No, most keys that people experienced that already were in use, were because of a handful of different things:

1. sloppy caretaking of covers etc on local LANs
2. getting their computers exploited (there were several worms afaik that stole cdkeys)
3. people writing down serial keys in stores (many stores used to have such things on display)
4. employees at mentioned stores, also writing down and supplying keys to friends
5. etc etc etc

The keygens were useless.

And Steam is the best thing to happen to Valve since Counter-Strike.

--
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.