No Half-Life 2 on Steam?

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?"

Comments

Re:Impatience and gamergeeks.

[keller999]

The issue is that Valve gets 2.5 times more revenue from each copy of HL2 sold on steam than from boxes on shelves. By circumventing the publisher, they can sell the game at a lower price and make more money. Just the sheer number of people who have pre-loaded HL2 probably scares Vivendi - it's one of the biggest game releases of all time, and it looks like the game creators might actually make more of the pie than the publisher is used to.

Re:why Steam?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm starting to wonder if any of these people who bitch about steam have even used it past the amazingly bad "beta".

Steam has given me absolutely ZERO problems for months. It hasn't crashed, locked up, anything.

I feel the same way about the typical Slashdot BSOD jokes. I run a 2 year-old Win2k install that hasn't needed any real maintenence. I haven't gotten a mystery reboot or BSOD *once*, yet all I hear whenever the discussion about Windows comes up is how X Slashdotter can't even get the thing to boot.

So, you're either all stupid as hell (likely), or really unlucky.

It's not the bugs, it's the DRM

[Cid Highwind]

Bugs or no bugs, Steam is unacceptable IMHO. When I buy a game on physical media, I have a tangible thing that belongs to me. I can install it on a new machine, I can lend it to a friend, I can sell it on eBay, I can keep playing it as long as I want, even after the publisher goes out of business. Steam allows none of that.

If Sierra goes belly up next week, how long do you think the Steam master server is going to be around? Probably not long. How can you sell a game you don't play anymore if it's on Steam? You can't! You don't actually have anything to sell, you've just been paying for access to someone else's game.