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Valve Games Still On Store Shelves
Valve has announced that despite its recent break with Vivendi Universal Games, games boxes will remain on store shelves after the August breakup. From the article: "The news will mollify retailers who feared that a recent legal settlement between Valve and VU Games, which will see VU Games withdrawing all of its Valve-created products from August 31st, could signal a move to online-only distribution for the firm's products."
How much of their customer base Valve would lose by going to an online distribution method as their only source?
Now we all know that you require an internet connection for signup and to download the latest patches. Suppose however, that Valve allowed anyone to burn generic copies of HL2 (and previous/future releases) to their media of choice and distribute freely. None of these freely distributed versions would be playable until the user signed up with Valve and payed the "activation" fee. Valve gets to save bandwidth and publishing costs, yet the game is still available to those without high speed connections.
Hmmm, maybe I should run to the patent office
I know that personally (as a game collector) would not buy games online. Maybe if they were budget games, but anything serious I want a box and a disc that I can put on my shelf, and in 10 years replay! I cant forsee ganking a DVD-R with HalfLife3 out of the binder and having it work in 10 years, let alone finding it.
Ofcourse online distribution would (if done properly) allow a company like Valve to sell their games cheaper, and have more direct control on the content. If they did it right, it would be a mixed bag.
video game, ecchi, bbs and classic computing fans unite to eat sushi
That said, I did get mine via Steam, but I bought the $59 version which included the entire Valve back catalog via Steam.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
You mean that I don't have to goto the mall anymore to buy games? What have I lost here? I'm only seeing this as a good thing.
Yeah, it's very much a quality-of-life thing for me. I find this whole 'going outside' phenomenon to be in quite direct conflict with what I perceive to be an otherwise efficient video gaming existence, and so Valve's measures certainly seem a step forward. Why make a time-consuming trip to the mall during which I am neither gaining levels nor increasing my frag count when I could be spending that same time doing productive things, like improving my gameplay strategies in titles already in my possession?
"That said, I did get mine via Steam, but I bought the $59 version which included the entire Valve back catalog via Steam."
Yeah I did the same. I figured I'd rather not have the CDs if I'm going to have to sign up for steam anyway - and the $10 additional for the back catalogue was the clincher. I guess if you already had licenses for the original Half Life that wouldn't be a great option though.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
yes you can make a backup of your game. I did it quite successfully when I moved to a new hdd.
It was actually better than installing again from the original discs because all the latest updates were already in it, whereas when installing from disc I would have had to wait for the updates to re-download