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: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.

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: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: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.