Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
Somewhere, Duke Nukem is cheering, now that he's no longer the standard of perpetually pushed back release dates.
What will this mean for people who got the voucher with their ATI card? ATI promised to give them Half Life 2 (through Steam), but then HL2 was delayed so they didn't get it (they instead got the old half-life gams). Would it eventually be released through steam?
I think HL2 will be better than Doom 3 as well, if it is released in the next month or so. If we have to wait for the trial (March 2005) and everything to be sorted out and it doesn't get released until fall 2005, its not going to be better, because it will be a year later, when every other FPS has "caught up". Once again, politics and legal are going to cost both companies a lot of money, both in fees and lost revenue from upset fans, and the delay making the game less desirable.
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.
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.
Don't tell SCO, but I suspect some lines of Halflife 2 code may match theirs.
I saw an endif and a return near each other in the leaked version.
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.
0 1 - just my two bits
We know that Valve must be in the wrong here. After all, Vivendi has a long history of keeping the developer's/creative's best interests in mind. Anyone remember Vivendi's excellent (and forward-thinking) handling of mp3.com? (VU sold the domain, but not the music itself, to CNet, presumably for One Hundred Billion Dollars, as well as some sexual favors and two FREE Igia nail clippers.)
I mean, who wanted all those free MP3s anyway? Most of them were made by artists who would never sell albums anyway! VU was actually being polite, by helping those musicians who never would have 'made it' to get a real job, like making the Fajita Sandwich Wrap Melts that Vivendi executives get at Wendys.
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.