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Half Life 2 Available, Delays Not Valve's Fault
Evil Avatar has the word that even Best Buy is selling Half-Life 2 boxes at this point. If you're planning on picking this one up it should be available pretty much anywhere. Voodoo Extreme has news from Steam that in no uncertain terms are the delays in opening the game to customers their fault. From the article: "This is not Valve's choice. Vivendi is insisting that the game has not yet been released, and has threatened that Valve would be in violation of its contract if we activate the Half-Life 2 Steam authentication servers at this time."
The game has to be activated via STEAM before you can play it. Even for single player.
ACtivation does not start until Tues. Nov 16th.
But you can drool over the box and wear your T-shirt until then!!
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
Here's the news link direct from valve:
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http://www.steampowered.com/index.php?area=news
Ask again when every game requires you to install it's own content download and authentication utility.
At which point, you either follow their rules, find a way around it, complain loudly, or take the damn game back for a refund. Couldn't be more simple.
Join the TWIT army now!
due to the contract from HL1 it made it so they had to use VU for HL2
If you're angry that VU is being a pain in the ass about this, the best thing you can do is cut them out of the profit stream by buying the game online as opposed to the boxed copy.
Valve, unlike almost all other developers out there, are financially independent of their publisher. VU have never given them a cent of money for anything they didn't earn.
HL1 was funded out of the founders own savings and HL2 was funded entirely of HL1's profits.
VU has only one task and that is to release the game on Valves terms, they don't own anything or anypart of HL except the rights to publish and release it in stores.
Valve started to get screwed when the old management team from Sierra left and Sierra became VU, they were selling HL licenses to Cyber-Cafe's without cutting Valve in on the action(which is still under legal dispute) and Valve demanded a contract re-negotiation(which they got).
Thats why Valve are pushing the Steam platform, they want out from dealing with Publishers and Steam is the most direct way to do it.
By using the most anticipated PC Game outside of Doom 3 to promote Steam they have an excellent chance to show other developers that they don't need a publisher to take a cut from their game to sell it to the public.
Read Errant Story.
Although this has been posted elsewhere in the comments for this story, it needs to be posted again.
The retail version of Half Life 2 is effectively a copy of the Steam cache of HL2 on discs. In order to play the game, you have to log in to the Steam authentication servers and activate it. This is being forced, as the game did not ship with the module containing the actual executable code(likely dubbed "half-life 2 client.gcf"), so the Steam authentication will allow buyers to acquire the last piece they need to play the game. Since the game didn't ship with this code however, no one can possibly crack the game ahead of time - the best they can do is work around the auth module and wait until the executable is released on November 16th.
The first people to play the game will be those who buy it, people waiting on the "free" version will likely be waiting at least a day for it to be cracked.
actually, if you read the recent gamespot article on the HL2 development backstory ("Final Hours"), it mentions that TF2 is still in the works and will be on the Source engine (and most likely available through - you guessed it - Steam).
This is nothing but the Alpha leak that was out earlier. Check the release dates on the torrents.
I didn't know that HL2 would REFUSE to be run until the 16th no matter what. So, like a good little lemming, I went and bought a copy today when I was at Best Buy. For $80, I thought "what the hell, the higher price will be worth it because I can play it tonight and not have to wait until the 19th to play it".
"The 19th???" you say? "But the game comes out on the 16th, right?" Yeah, but what person with a real job and family can actually play games on weekdays?! Gimme a break....
So, in a way, it IS a big deal. Granted, no one is going to die over this, but it is enough to piss me off to the point where I am considering making a complaint to Best Buy about selling the game before I can even play it. THAT is just not cool...
I already had the HL2 preload. Someone could have saved me around $30 or so by telling me that no matter what I did I wasn't going to get to play the game early.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
WTG with knowing all the facts. VU and Valve are involved in lawsuits with each other. VU doesn't want Valve games distributed over Steam because they wouldn't get any money as publisher. Valve counter-sued and now they're basically hating each other.
It's not denial. It's a legal tactic.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
For that I use the free tool ISOBuster to create an ISO, and then use DAEMON Tools (also free) to mount it as a "virtual CD" (which looks just like a CD, but it's really the ISO on my hard drive).
Then I can do the minimal install, because the additional content it reads from the "CD", it's actually getting from the hard drive! ;-)
So your laptop batteries will last much longer, since it doesn't have to spin both the hard drive and the CD-ROM; and your game will take up almost the same amount of space on your hard drive (possibly less, if the content on the CD is compressed).
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Getting your game into stores is not a matter of calling them and telling them it's available. You have to have contacts at the companies (called "buyers", as in "I have a meeting with the buyer for Best Buy"), you have to sell them on why they should even bother to stock it (usually preorders determine the amount they stock, and that's a bit of a chicken and egg problem when you're looking to find places to sell it), and you have to know their buying schedule (Best Buy buys new products 4 times a year, and if you miss that you have to wait until the next one to try to convince them to buy a batch). Plus anyone who has worked with Wal Mart knows that they call the shots and they will ask for a censored version of your game if it is too violent/adult/etc. You are absolutely, positively at the mercy of Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal Mart, EB, Gamestop, Fry's, etc.
I worked on a game called Savage, where we created our own publisher for it, and still contracted out to Tri Synergy to handle getting the boxes into stores. We had a lot of people who couldn't find the game at stores, precisely because we didn't have a bigger publisher who could convince the stores that they needed to have more than a couple copies at each store. Again, it's a chicken and egg thing. Almost regardless of the quality of your game, if you can convince the stores to buy LOTS of copies and put up big displays, you'll have big sales. If you remember on Savage, we did a deal to get into the beta if you pre-ordered the game. This wasn't some money-grubbing thing, it was because we were desperate to get the game into stores and we needed pre-orders to show them that some Indy developer had something worth selling.
Finally, my mom isn't going to go on Steam and buy Half Life 2 Silver for a family member as a Christmas gift. She's going to want a box to give. Holiday sales make up 60% of game sales for the year.
Valve stands to make some nice cash off their sales over Steam, but don't kid yourself and think they'll get even 10% of the total sales on there. They need a publisher more than you can imagine.
*obvious note: my statements are my own and do not reflect the views of either S2 Games or Activision
You are misinformed, unfortunately.
This round of lawsuits started several years ago; contractual disputes between Vivendi and Valve go back as far as the commercial release of Counter-Strike.
Gabe Newell did NOT finance Half Life 2 out of his own pocket. Valve took quite a bit of Vivendi's money in exchange for distribution rights.
Retail distribution costs are VERY HIGH; manufacturing, distribution, advertisement, retail promotion, shelf-space agreements, and other overhead add up to a significant portion of a game's budget. Stamping out CDs is cheap; getting them into the public eye (and the public's hands) is an entirely different story.
Valve negotiated their contract with Vivendi while downplaying the usage of Steam as a retail channel. They represented the sales environment as being primarily driven by retail and mail-order. Yet while they were performing these negotiations, they were secretly working on plans to aggressively push Steam and cut down Vivendi's retail distribution. This kind of two-faced policy is definately a "dirtbag thing to do".
It is also a potential source of liability in court. I don't know what the precise contract states, and I don't know who is technically in the right and who is in the wrong. But I do know that neither Valve nor Vivendi is going to come out smelling like roses, because both sides have been extremely shady about their dealings with each other.
Actually, valve behaves in the opposite fashion, they have added extra authentication to Half-Life one by requiring steam to be installed in order to play or update it.
If Valve unlocked it, people would flock to buy it on Steam, or at least I suspect that is VU's thinking. Only BB are selling it early, and VU want to make as much money as they can, and we know from the litigation that they're not happy with Steam in the first place.
Maybe if every retailer was selling it early, they'd let Valve unlock it, but at the moment with only one retailer pulling in money for VU, it just doesn't appeal.