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."

Comments

Do you think it was worth the money?

[snuf23]

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.

Re:Do you think it was worth the money?

[Gregg Alan]

I also purchased via steam (went with the cheapo $50 version).

I don't think HL2 was worth the money or the hype that surrounds it. Honestly, the game just isn't that much fun. The story line was flat. The weapons (excepting the gravity gun) were nothing special. The game feels unfinished. And the ending was boring.

I had a much better time playing Far Cry. The first time I played it I thought it was never going to end. It's much longer than HL2 and cost me the same amount.

I still liked HL2, but Far Cry is a much better value. I should learn my lesson... hyped games always disappoint me while the sleepers are great. (I never heard much about Far Cry but maybe I missed it.)

Re:Do you think it was worth the money?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Do you think it was worth the money?

[Richard_at_work]

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.

Re:Do you think it was worth the money?

[chromaphobic]

It's funny how drastically different reactions people have to games. My experiences were almost exactly the opposite. I found Half-Life 2 to be one of the best games ever, almost certainly the best FPS ever. Far Cry on the other hand, I thought was just awful. I'd rank it as one of the worst FPS ever.

Different strokes for different folks, eh? :-)

The Future

[Mr.Dippy]

So 1.7 million people are going to be really pissed in like 5 years when Valve gets bought out by EA and EA discontinues the Steam servers making everybodies HL2 game unplayable.

Re:The Future

[PoderOmega]

How many times is this FUD example going to come up? Yes, it is possible this will happen. But I have a feeling if this type of situation arose, Valve would release a non-steam patch before totally going out of business. Yes Steam authenication sucks, and I hope someone does sue them to prove that I did, in fact, buy that game, not just a license to play by their rules. But I would bet cash that if there was a steam doomsday, there would be a non-steam patch release.

Re:The Future

[NanoGator]

"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.

Meanwhile, back in reality...

[Mike Hawk]

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.

Re:Meanwhile, back in reality...

[superpulpsicle]

This year I played console games online on the PS2 for the first time. With no graphic problems, no major tweaking needed. It just worked out-of-box.

Today I play as much games online on my PS2 as my PC. That's something I never thought would be possible for me anyways.

If they shipped the next consoles with a mouse, keyboard, hard drive, I'd say PC gaming is toast. A game like HL2 can easily be done on a PS3 and xbox2.

Re:Meanwhile, back in reality...

[Propagandhi]

Nothing new about PC games being outsold by their console counterparts. It's been a long time since any PC game held a long term sales record (Myst). All that matters is that PC games are still profitable, and as consoles become more and more similar to your home PC development for both (or I guess I should say "all") platforms will become even more common than it is now.

Re:Meanwhile, back in reality...

[Osty]

The problem (one that will not go away) with consoles is that for the lifetime (~6 years for the PS2) of the console its specs will not get any better, so PC gaming will surpass it.

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.

Re:Meanwhile, back in reality...

[Osty]

Have you seen GTA:SA on a good TV ?

Yes, and it looks like ass. However, notice that I held up GTA:SA as an example of expanded environments compared to previous iterations in this console generation, and not as a paragon of graphical goodness.

Have you seen Resident Evil 4 on a good TV ?

Nope, but then I'm not really interested in RE4, which is beside the point.

I'm talking the kind of TV you can connect your computer DVI output on and play in widescreen.

My TV is about a year too old to have a DVI input, and it only supports 480p and 1080i (no 720p), but for all that it's well-calibrated and looks good. I've not hooked a PC up to it, but my XBox (and to a lesser extent, GameCube) looks good running on the TV in 480p or 1080i.

Playing NFS Underground 2 on it is incredible. Now, a friend of yours bring his console to show you his favorite game .. Both of you will notice the VERY LOW QUALITY that they render on. XBox, GameCube or PS2, none of them give a good quality render "out of the box".

The PS2 renders with "very low quality" textures because it doesn't have the VRAM for better. The XBox, assuming you're playing a game built for the XBox and not a PS2 port (ie, skip anything from EA), can do much higher texture resolutions than either the PS2 or Gamecube, and while it's not on par with the current bleeding edge of PC hardware, it's pretty damned good for four year old hardware.

Perhaps you can buy some GPU update for them somewhere but I never heard about it ;) That low quality isn't that apparent on a 27" TV but when your DVI is connected at 720p you see the difference. On the stability issue, when did you really had a crash in a game ? I've not for the six months I've had my current computer, neither with the current geforce 6 nor with the previous geforce 4 ...

It seems you've misunderstood my "stability" argument. I was not talking about lack of crashes, but instead the stability of the platform itself. The point here is that games designed for a console have a single, stable hardware target (as in the target doesn't change, not that the hardware doesn't crash), be it a PS2, Gamecube, or XBox. A GPU upgrade would destabilize this situation by adding another component that not everyone may have. If you're a PC game developer, you don't have the luxury of a single target. You have to build a test matrix of different CPUs, video cards, memory configurations, operating systems, etc. That's also a major reason why console games typically have much better QA than PC gamess (no, it's not because PC games are more easily patched), because the test requirements are increased exponentially.

From a development perspective, more time spent with the same hardware breeds familiarity. Because the hardware will not change from underneath you, you can learn the tricks of the hardware, and write to it directly without having to deal with an abstraction layer because you have to support both nVidia and ATI video cards, or Intel and AMD CPUs, or Pentium 3s and Pentium 4s. While there is less raw power in the hardware than with a PC, there is far more power to finesse a solution, because you don't have to worry about oddball hardware in 239047293879877892 different configurations.

"from the so-many-headcrabs! dept."

[chalkoutline]

more like so-many-god-damned-ant-lions dept. curse them and their protective hides!

PC gaming dead?

[BigDogCH]

Did i miss something in the last few weeks? Why would pc gaming be dead?

Sorta...

[raygundan]

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.

Re:Pre-Sale vouchers

[mythosaz]

HL2 was also bundled with every Athlon64 + Motherboard (or, large numbers of them) from most retailers. It's how I got mine.

Re:Get your facts straight

[dougmc]

There are HDTV capable consoles (Xbox and Gamecube) but you have to buy the HD plugs and obviously have a HDTV.

So there are. But it looks like only certain games support these enhanced resolutions -- which I guess is true for PC games too.

Whether the keyboard/mouse combo is better for FPSs is debatable as well as based on personal preferance.

Really, what's happened is that console games have been dumbed down to be playable with the little joysticks/joypads that they give you. With a mouse, you can zero in on the bad guy's face and get a head shot off very quickly -- with a joypad, it would take much longer to do so, so the console game is set up to either auto-aim for you, or to make it so making head shots really isn't important to the game -- either you get no extra benefit from it, or the game is easy enough that you don't need to make them very often.

But if you tried to play something like the PC version of UT with a joypad like you had on an X-Box, vs. guys with keyboard and mouse, you'd get pwn3d quick. It's just that the PC version makes it important to be able to aim precisely, something the joypad just isn't good at.

Not quite. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can write a PC game. But to write a console game, you need to get a development kit from the console maker, and pay them royalties on every game made.

True, but how many PC games do you think are 'copy-cat' games?

Probably a number similar to the number of console games that are `copy-cat' games. The vast majority of games out there, PC and console, are copies of other games, with some tweaking or new features. Few are revolutionary rather than evolutionary.

The grandparent post of this post was claiming that `Exclusive PC titles are a rare breed these days' -- which couldn't be further from the truth. And I pointed out why. (Though I guess if you restrict yourself to `big budget, blockbuster titles', then maybe that statement is becoming true.)

As for consoles not getting RTSs is a matter of RTS games being TOO complex for the general gamer.

Ok, I won't argue too much about that -- I really can't claim to know too much about what your average console player wants.

But since there will always be `extra'-ordinary games, PC games will *never* die, at least until the consoles can cater to them a little better.

Re:That explains it.

[C0rinthian]

It's a great game, but why do I have to prove online that I am not a thief before I can play? I'm glad my car manufacturer doesn't treat me the same way.

Yeah it's not like you need to have some sort of "registration" paper showing that it's your car...

Run Steam in Offline mode.

[Glaeken]

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.