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Half-Life 2 Retail to Require Steam Activation
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent Gamespy interview with Doug Lambardi it was revealed that the retail version of Half-Life 2 will require product activation. This isn't just restricted to multiplayer, you will have to create a Steam account and activate your retail purchase before you can even run single-player. "
I just love how Valve changed what they originally said about this...
All hail Valve, our next Microsoft Product Activation-like overlord.
Sounds like a move to try and get people to see Steam, and consider not buying the next Valve product in the stores.
Some ideas of Steam are nice, but I still don't like the idea of buying a product through it. Skipping the publishers is a bad thing, as they fund the new games. Sure, publishers need to treat the developers better, but to try and axe them out of the picture completely is a bad idea.
Sorry Valve, but I have no intention of letting Steam ever tough my PC. I will buy your game (if it turns out to be worth it), and I will acquire a crack to enable it.
Don't fuck over your customers. Things will get much worse.
Your logic is, "Skipping the publishers is a bad thing, as they fund the new games."
But the whole point of skipping the publishers is to get enough money so the developers can "fund the new games". And when you get to that point, WHY do we, as gamers, or developers, need or want publishers?
GPL Deconstructed
Oh no not again (crashing bowl of petunias time).
I'm going to ROTFL because the innocent notion of
requiring "Product Activation" has not so innocent
consequences.
Here goes:
Once upon a time there was a Greek company (yes, I'm the dumb programmer who had to do it) who thought that having a product *locked* to a machine was a good idea. They thought about Dongles (yuck) and other stuff, and eventually came up with a relatively innocous scheme.
So, they *required* product activation. Here's the bad news. Customers machines *break* and hence they trouble your support lines in lemming like droves. So, the more product you sell - the *LESS*
money you make because you have to hire more zombies for the support dept. (So, in our case a
$20 product ended up losing us $21... - or something like that).
AAARRGGHH!
One activation code - yes, and then forever more you allow *reactivation* on other machines. OK, that doesn't kill piracy, but you have to take the
rough with the smooth here...
(and remember you don't know how much information
is going back over the wire about your machine + environment. Get seriously FUDDED). Hell, just buy
from another company. (Like the Coca Cola classic
fiasco, if they want to sell it they'll have to listen).
No you really don't. The crack already exists today (the Steam debug client that most hl related leaks use), It just needs to be hacked onto the final hl2 release, which will take about 30minutes. As for the demo.. Go download CS:Source and see if it runs on your machine.
If you're not afraid of your console and making your game ugly, theres plenty of ways to speed up the game. If I didn't hate Valve and Counterstrike with a passion now, I'd make a howto, but cvarlist mat_ and screw with those settings for better fps, namely mat_dxlevel 70 as I said in another post.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Actually it *is* a big deal. I have some games that required activation from a few years ago where the company decided to stop issuing activation codes. Thanks, but no thanks, they can go to hell before I buy another game that requires activation.
Sig under construction since 1998.
They may have a point.
There was a bug in Cstrike recently where if someone changed their name to include a " %n ", it would immediately crash the server and all the clients. They rolled out the fix sometime Monday, I think.
About Wednesday, one of the players on the server I was on changed his name to include a %n. This blew away about half the people on the server. Why? Because the pirates didn't have the fixed version yet.
As long as he sat there with the %n, nobody with a pirated game could logon, and the 40-person server was unable to climb above about 24 people. Normally, it's at 40 players 95% of the time.
Pirated Counterstrike, in other words, is extremely, extremely common. I don't know if it's deliberate on Valve's part, but they don't seem to be doing a good job AT ALL of shutting out the thieves. One thought that comes to mind is that maybe they're trying to get online 'buzz' early on, by making sure there are lots of Cstrike players. Perhaps they'll get more aggressive about shutting down pirates once the game hits store shelves.
But, it is also possible that they CAN'T for some reason... which, if true, doesn't encourage me that they'll get CS:S terribly cheat-free.
Looked like about 50-60% pirated copies on the server I was on. Real shame.