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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."
Well.. I am sure there will be a crack out by that time, as the current trend by game depeloppers seems to be to try their best to pust their loyal customers towards piratism.
So.. They expect me to slam down some cash for a game and then they make me download another program from the internet to get the gamen to run. As far as i'm concirned that makes half life 2 broken and you have to get the fix from the internet. Fsck this. I don't buy broken games.
Day 1 at Valve: Hmmm, how do we spend a few years making whatever game we feel like with absolutely no risk? I got it! We get a publisher like Vivendi to give us tons of money to pay for the entire development effort, up front.
Day 2 at Valve: Thanks Vivendi, for giving us a literal truckload of money up front. We'll call you in a few years when our next game is ready.
Day 3 at Valve: Hey team, lets sell our game online. This may piss off our publisher, so maybe we should tell them. (Maybe they actually had a dialogue?)
...
Day 801 at Slashdot: The big evil company won't let us play our game.
Why would Vivendi finance some or all of the development and not deserve some of the money?
I have no problem with the former (though it seems silly to force legitimate users to go to the extra trouble), but I would never buy any software with product activation.
A PC game company decides to replace a cumbersome and much-disliked CD copy protection mechanism with an unobtrusive, relatively-harmless one-time online activation system designed to discourage piracy of their single-player game. Without pausing for a breath or a second thought, the Slashbot crowd lights up their torches, grabs their pitchforks, and spills into the streets, howling at the top of their lungs. Liberté - Egalité - Fraternité!
Meanwhile, 70% of those indignant twits are running Windows XP, an operating system that tethers their entire PC and every application running on it to an activation server in Redmond, Washington.
Methinks the crowd doth protest too much... and way the fuck too late.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
1) Who would have a computer fast enough to run HL2 and no internet whatsoever? You could even get a free AOL trial if you absolutely couldn't get internet (You don't have to have a constant connection)
2) The $90 just comes with a bunch of extra stuff like Hats, strategy guides, etc. There is a $60 version, which includes every Valve game made to this point, and a $50 version which only comes with HL2 and CS:S
3) If Steam is ever shut down, I can confidently guarentee that Valve would release some sort of patch for people to play without the online auth.
I personally believe Half Life 1's phenomenal success as an online game was due to the fact anyone could run a server, join a server, and that the master list was available for free.
This is still Completely true. They are not charging any extra fees for Steam.