Slashdot Mirror
EA To Publish for Valve
Primotech writes "It appears that Valve has secured EA as its new publisher. When the developer settled its lawsuit with Vivendi back in April, the company was left without a publisher to distribute boxed copies of its games. The company has tapped EA, which will publish and release Half-Life 2: Game of the Year Edition and Half-Life 2 for the Xbox sometime this year. From the article: 'EA is the worldwide leader in bringing best of breed games, for all platforms, to market...By combining EA's unparalleled operation structure and distribution channel with Valve's award-winning development teams and games community, we've established an awesome combination for delivering great products to console and PC gamers around the world.'"
Maybe EA will learn a few things about online implementation from Valve, rather than stick to this GameSpy travesty that haunts Battlefield 2 at the moment. Favorite servers, history, friends network...even though some of these don't work at all, they are features sorely missed in BF2.
Firstly, they need a publisher for the X-Box version (presumably the fact that they went with EA means that they couldnt or didnt want to self-publish this)
And secondly they need a publisher to get copies of things like expansions, mods (and also the eventual Half-Life 3) onto store shelves (not everyone is prepared/able to buy HL2 from Steam)
According to GameSpot, Valve is self-publishing the title. EA is only distributing the game (i.e. using their contacts to get their games into stores like Toys R Us and Target). That's it. Nothing to freak out about.
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
Clone CD did it for me. It ignored Dameon Tools, but until I pulled Clone CD, it didn't work.