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Half Life 2 Retail Sales Hit 1.7 Million
blueZhift writes "It looks like PC gaming is not dead yet! GamesIndustry.biz reports that retail sales of Valve's Half Life 2 have topped 1.7 million. There aren't any numbers available for online sales via Steam, but these are impressive numbers for any platform, console or PC."
Halo 2 sold 6 million copies on a closed platform and as I type this there are roughly the same number of people playing HL2 online for free as playing Halo 2 online as part of a pay service.
Its not dead, but PC gaming is staggering in a standing 8 count right now.
Mod away, but it won't change the numbers.
"How many times is this FUD example going to come up? Yes, it is possible this will happen."
If it's possible, as you say, then why's it FUD? Why is your feeling that Valve would release that patch more likely to happen than anybody else's feeling that they won't? The mere fact that they're requiring Steam to play it says to me "They really don't give a rat's ass about our right to play it." That may or may not be true, but I'd be surprised if you had some other example of Valve's behaviour to suggest that they may actually release such a patch.
Either way, it doesn't matter. Valve doesn't have a good reputation with some people. You're not going to change that until they do something that proves they're getting back on track. Until that happens, your best bet is to just own up to the fact that some of their business practices are offensive and, believe it or not, the people who are offended by them aren't looney tunes.
"Derp de derp."
"I purchased via Steam to avoid having to do a CD check as well as the Steam sign on (as with the retail version)."
You know they removed the CD-check about 4 weeks after the game was released. Valve aren't stupid. People complained and they did something about it.
You have to get an "offline ticket" from the servers. The bug/problem right now is that if you don't know that Steam is down and leave your ethernet cable connected-- you'll get the "cannot connect to steam" message and your offline ticket will be erased. Which means that you can't play offline until you can get online to get your offline ticket renewed.
Once you've seen the error message, it's too late, and you can't play online or offline until the servers come back up.
And you can't just get a ticket and leave the cable unplugged forever, either-- the ticket expires on its own.
They could fix this easily by simply not disabling the offline ticket until after the connection attempt is finished-- but right now, a failed attempt with you still connected to the internet will disable your game until the servers come back up.
Terrible.
Hes talking about putting the CD into the drive each time you play the game. You are talking about proving to Steam that you bought the game, so it can decrypt the game files, and this is an install time only thing. Two totally different things.
HL2 works just fine when you start Steam in offline mode. Just load steam with no active internet connection and it prompts you to run in off line mod where upon you can launch and play Hl2. Obviously CS Source does not work but HL2 plays just fine.