No Half-Life 2 on Steam? 374
Karl the Pagan writes "Following on the heels of a previous Steam-related story, Vivendi Universal may block Half-Life 2 distribution via Steam. Additional motions can be filed until November 18th, but since Sierra/VU have final QA approval on the HL2 gold is it possible they could delay the game until after the court decides on these motions?"
nope... (Score:5, Informative)
Also, they've already said they are releasing it on Steam regardless of this case.
read here for more:
article on bluesnews.com [bluesnews.com]
Onos (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Worth the wait. (Score:5, Informative)
Sort of amusing. I wonder if Id's getting a kickback from ATI, Nvidia, etc. :)
Re:Great news (Score:3, Informative)
valve's been piss poor to deliver anything and lusting over the collecting the fees from the cybercafes.
they're pissing on their feet though, with the hl key system horribly sucking too(it's not really that uncommon that you lose your key to someone running some keygen, leading into some major suckery to get it back, in some cases people have bought the game still in wrappers and went home for some cs and noticed that the key was already in use).
Re:Worth the wait. (Score:1, Informative)
Ah, I feel sorry for the saps that bought the repackaged cards, thinking they're brand new.
Re:ATI bundle? (Score:2, Informative)
Also of interest the ATI voucher gives you the a bundle of the original half-life as well as the expansions made by valve.
If you activate with steam you can download the whole bundle and play it right away. And well pre-load HL2 and hope it gets unlocked some day.
Re:It's not the bugs, it's the DRM (Score:1, Informative)
Valve has them under their belts, so if Sierra goes belly up, it would become a national holiday, and i'd still be playing my TFC!
SCREW YOU VU AND SIERRA!
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Re:Great news (Score:5, Informative)
The serial code for Half-Life is 14 digits, meaning a total of 289.254.654.976 possible combinations.. giving that the game has sold something like 20 million copies, that would turn out to try at least 20.000 keys before hitting one successful.. and as far as i know, no key generators checked with the WON network, so you'd just have to try (and that takes at least 15 seconds)..
No, most keys that people experienced that already were in use, were because of a handful of different things:
1. sloppy caretaking of covers etc on local LANs
2. getting their computers exploited (there were several worms afaik that stole cdkeys)
3. people writing down serial keys in stores (many stores used to have such things on display)
4. employees at mentioned stores, also writing down and supplying keys to friends
5. etc etc etc
The keygens were useless.
And Steam is the best thing to happen to Valve since Counter-Strike.
Re:Great news (Score:2, Informative)
TinyURL link [tinyurl.com].
Gotta love content management systems with their inscrutable query strings..
Re:nope... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not like HL2 is the only iron that Vivendi has in the fire. Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft -- heck ALL the Blizzard games, the Empire Earth series, Tribes: Vengeance, and so on. There are literally dozens of titles, some of which have the potential to be bigger than HL. Sure, they don't want to lose the HL2 revenue, but it's hardly going to kill them if it happens.
"I don't think I am wrong when I say Sierra exisits because of HL1."
Sierra doesn't really exist anymore other than as a vague shadow of their former selves. Now they're simply a small vassal of Vivendi in the grand scheme of things. In fact, Vivendi closed down the former Sierra offices and killed Dynamix off a few months ago. All that's left of Sierra, really, is the name.
Re:Release Schedule (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great news (Score:3, Informative)