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Half-Life 2 Street Date
JFlex writes "According to Valve's website, Half-Life 2 will hit the streets on November 16th! From the press release: "The Company confirmed that Half-Life 2, developed by Valve Software, has gone gold with a planned retail street date of November 16, 2004." Gonna have to rush home and beat Halo 2 as fast as possible to free up some time for HL2!!"
Heh. I emailed the on-duty editor, saying that this was old news. In fact, I mentioned the VU press release that was edited into the article. The press release is from October 18th. Abort the story instead of making a nonsensical edit, /., this is old stuff.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Thanks for the news!
I've stopped paying attention to all news regarding Arafat's condition and Half Life 2. I was listening to the radio during my 15 minute drive home the other night and when I got in the car, the news was saying that a reliable source close to Arafat said that they were going to pull the plug as soon as some religious leader finished giving him whatever final blessings he needs. Just as I got home, I hear that his doctors are saying that he is in ok condition and will probably last a while longer!
That is about the same as the news about HL2 has been for too long. "HL2 is going to be released tomorrow!" "Oh, wait... Make that next month!"
I suggest we all just ignore both of these things until we have real proof that (a) Half Life 2 is really out for the public to purchase and play and (b) that Arafat is really dead and doesnt have any plans for resurrection.
I don't understand this viewpoint. All games these days have copy protection in one form or another. For the most part, these schemes are more of a hindrance to the legitimate users than the dedicated pirates. Steam actually gets rid of all the annoying problems caused by current copy-protection, and goes a long way towards actually preventing piracy. No requiring the CD in the drive, no hardware issues, no worrying about losing your key or having someone else use it, game content delivered as soon as it is available, patches downloaded automatically... And the best part: an online distribution system like Steam may help release game developers from their dependence on huge publishers. Frankly, I think more people should be rejoicing about Steam and the way it is changing the games industry.
6 years down the line, I can still install Win98 on an old machine, provided I have the drivers to run the hardware. Never the less, it will still install and work. The same goes for Windows 95, 3X, NT, and 2000.
The same cannot be said for Windows XP. Can you guarantee that when WinXP goes out of support, MS will still hand out unlock codes? My greatest fear is not putting the CD in when a program runs, or having some dumb dongle, or some gimmick. My biggest fear is putting the power to run YOUR computer software in the hands of some company that can decide not to support it whenever they wish, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it.
A likely scenerio I can see Valve going through is thus:
1: They produce a forced online-register for new game.
2: A while passes, and game is "old".
3: More time passes, and they start loosing revenue.
4: They decide to sell themselves (and their IP) to another company
5: That company cares not if further "registrations" go on, and let the online register servers die.
6: That money you paid for to get that game is now suddenly... worthless, and the new parent comapny cares not.
Case in point: Aureal sound cards... Creative bought the rights to them, and now do absolutely nothing with them. Any work done is on Linux, and reverse engineered from Windows drivers.