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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."
I purchased via Steam to avoid having to do a CD check as well as the Steam sign on (as with the retail version).
I paid $60 for the silver version which includes the Valve back catalogue.
The main HL2 game certainly was a lot of fun, although the load times could be annoying and the overall game was kind of short. In particular the last levels where a large amount of time is spent on the cool but non-interactive ride, followed by an ending that is more "huh?" than "woah!".
The long term value is arguably good. I myself can't get into Counter Strike and the added on HL2 deathmatch becomes dull quickly. I am looking forward to the mod community's releases to extend the value of the game.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
HL2 was also bundled with every Athlon64 + Motherboard (or, large numbers of them) from most retailers. It's how I got mine.
(Different A.C.)
"It makes sure everyone's up to date with the latest client so any dangerous exploits are quickly fixed."
Uh, exploits in a single-player, offline game? I'd say that running steam all the time and letting it connect to the net opens a big fat attack vector where there wasn't one before.
Absolutely, counter-strike source and HL-DM should have an auto-updater. But it should be a: possible to disable it (many people dislike later versions of CS for instance) and b: only active when the game is running and the option to play online is selected. It should not lock you out of the offline game if the login server is down. Steam is not required, and it has convinced me to not purchase HL2 - copy protection measures should not be taken so far as to lose you legitimate customers!
On the other hand, due to the hardware staying static for 5-6 years, developers become more and more proficient with the platform and are able to eek out more than you would expect (see Gran Turismo 4, for example, which will do 60fps 1080i on an aging PS2, or compare FFIX on the PSOne to FFVII in terms of graphics, or compare GTA:SA with GTA3 on the PS2 in terms of huge levels with barely noticeable load times). Compare almost any launch title on any console to games shipping near that same console's end of life and you'll find vastly increased graphics, AI, larger levels, etc (of course within reason -- load times that are tied to the speed of the optical drive won't increase, but by becoming more familiar with the platform developers are better able to stream content or compress files so that load times effectively increase).
In that same time period, while PCs may make huge jumps in GPU or CPU power, games still have to be written to a common-denominator set of hardware that is typically 2-3 years old. A good developer can scale their technology well enough that you can have something like HL2 that runs acceptably well on DX7-level hardware (ie, ~3-5 years old) while still blowing you away on DX9-level hardware (current). How long did it take to build something like Half-Life 2 or Doom 3? 4-5 years (id started working on Doom 3 in 2000, and Valve supposedly was working on HL2 even before that). It only took 3 years to develop Halo 2 (assuming that Bungie started on it immediately after the 2001 launch of Halo, which is doubtful -- I'm sure the guys needed a nice long vacation, and got it), including a full multi-player and single-player experience (Doom 3 and HL2 are very much single-player-only, and no CS:S doesn't count since it's the same damn game as 7 years ago with prettier graphics), a full story (regardless of what people think about the ending, I felt it was a good second chapter, setting up a third Halo), and even a brand new engine (yes, the Halo 2 engine is all-new). Bungie had the benefit of targetting a single, stable hardware platform, while id and Valve had to run their games through huge test matrices of various different CPU configurations, memory configurations, OS configurations, video card configurations, hard drive configurations, sound card configurations, you name it.
Consoles developers will always have stability on their side, and if you ask any console game developer they'll tell you they would gladly sacrifice the ability to target the current bleeding edge hardware (that fewer than 1% of the target market will have anyway, so you can't write to it exclusively) in exchange for the stability provided by a console platform (bitching about the PS2's awkwardness to develop against aside, anyway).
Hell, even id built Doom 3 with the XBox in mind, making sure that the technology they were developing would be possible on the XBox even as they scaled it up to hardware two or three times as powerful as the lowly 'Box.