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Halflife 2 Delayed Again?
erax0r writes "Gamespot reports that HL2 could be delayed yet again. "Court filings show VU Games has the right to sit on finished Half-Life 2 code for up to six months. Could it be deja vu all over again?"
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And the funny thing is, not being a subscriber, when I click on the "Read More..." button, I see a big ad "Are you ready? HL2" on the side, and I'm thinking to myself, yeah I'm ready, my computer's ready, Valve and VU games are the only ones not ready... c'mon people!
'The staff in the hand of a wizard may be more than a prop for age,' -Hamá, the doorward
I never understood why someone stealing the source code caused a delay before. It's not like they deleted the only copy. They just MADE a copy. I think they just like seeing their title in headlines all the time.
This game better not suck. What's funnier is a huge HL2 ad on the right when I hit read more.
Chris
It blows my mind to think that VUG would "sit on" such a big game and not make any money off of it for 6 months when they certainly could use the cash. Does this make sense to anybody else? It doesn't to me.
It's a game of chicken, honestly.
Vivendi Universal Games is in poor shape financially, and they have been counting on Half-Life 2 to help turn things around. They can, of course, threaten to delay the game past the holiday season as a way to bargain, but it would seem to be suicide to actually do it.
Delaying past the holiday season hurts both them and Valve. Expect the game to come out this year (November 1st is looking likely, a whole array of retailers recently updated to that date when adding the Half-Life 2 Collector's Edition) and the issue over Steam to be settled later (i.e., if it is discovered that they did something underhanded, Valve may have to fork over a good chunk of change after-the-fact).
Neither Valve nor VU Games want this delayed, and there is no reason to expect it to be with the first release candidate already in VU's hands.
It seems to me that Vivendi is stuck between a rock and a hard place here. There's no doubt that they need the revenue, and I'm sure they have every intention of being able to put that revenue on their Q4 books. Q4 is what makes or breaks software publishers.
Their options right now are to either release to retail and see a significant amount of that revenue go directly in to Valve's pockets. Many, many people will be buying this game on Steam if that happens. This isn't the Sims we're talking about. A significant percentage of potential cusomers have high-end machines with broadband connections, and since Steam has been pushing content to its users for a while now, I suspect many of them will just click the button that says 'instant gratification' instead of trundling out to the nearest big box retailer to buy this.
On the other hand, if Vivendi delays release beyond the Christmas season, and somehow manages to prohibit Valve form releasing on Steam, they will not be able to post that revenue in Q4 and there's a real chance sales will be lower than they would have been had the game been released in time for Christmas.
The only way Vivendi can win this is by compelling Valve not to release on Steam and still getting the game out in time for Christmas. What they're doing now is simply attempting to buy some time for their lawyers to attempt to achieve this. I suspect that, if no agreement has been reached within the next six to eight weeks, Valve will have effectively called Vivendi's bluff and Vivendi will be forced to release in time for Christmas rather than risk missing the holidays and losing a significant percentage of potential sales to Steam.
I want the fire back.
In a weird way, I'd love to see both sides lose this.
In the red corner, we have Vivendi. The faceless media giant that sums up everything that we're constantly being told is wrong with the games industry. A soul-less money-making machine, with no interest in the quality or artistic merits of the products they put out, determined to grind the poor suffering developers into abject poverty.
In the blue corner, we have Valve. The developer which seems to be trying to set itself up as a rival to 3d Realms in the contest for the title of "biggest running joke of the gaming industry." They had one excellent hit over half a decade ago, which has been shamelessly miked since then through a series of mediocre expansion packs and "gold" editions. Their latest project is to force everybody who wants to play their games to use a creaking, occasionally-works (kind of) DRM client to run them. The service is erratic, the client is buggy and the only real benefit is for Valve's bank balance.
Sorry if the above sounds overly negative, but I do think that regardless of how good the end product turns out to be, the entire process of its development does little to cast anybody at all in the industry in a good light.