Half-Life 3 Trademark Filed In Europe 150
jones_supa writes "A trademark application for Half-Life 3, possibly the next entry in Valve's excruciatingly dormant Half-Life franchise, has been filed in Europe, according to the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market, the European Union's trademark and designs registry. The OHIM's database lists the Half-Life 3 trademark as owned by Valve Corporation, and filed on its behalf by Casalonga & Associés, a patent and trademark firm. The trademark covers 'computer game software,' 'downloadable computer game software via a global computer network and wireless devices' and other goods and services. The application was filed on Sept. 29. There is no equivalent trademark on record at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office."
I sure hope this means... (Score:2, Insightful)
...that HL3 is actually possible!
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Re:I sure hope this means... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Chances are the trademark also includes unreported logos and new variations of wording. Also there is the reported updated usage wording which lawyers feel make it necessary.
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Yep. Not only do you have to use it for it to be defensible, but you have to actively defend it as well. Failing to take action to protect your trademark is legally implicitly agreeing that you no longer wish to retain exclusive ownership of that mark. That is why anybody can market their moving staircase contraption as an Escalator, and Otis Co. has no say in the matter anymore.
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You have to use it within a certain amount of time after registration. In most places this is around 5 years.
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and actually... if they just create a holder page - give a press release or whatever - that is usage. maybe this means that in 5 years they announce it.
but like someone already commented they have half-life already covered for a game related use.
I've said it before and I'll say it again the problem with HL series is that it has no direction, nobody knows where the story is supposed to to go - nobody even inside valve knows the even the context of the story, background or anything. that's why hl2 and the epi
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but like someone already commented they have half-life already covered for a game related use.
With trademarks, it helps to be very specific. In particular, it makes the unique mark far easier to defend in a civil court case.
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Re:I sure hope this means... (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing. Patents and Trademarks are completely distinct things.
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Because patents are very time-limited and they come with public disclosure. You do understand that patents, copyrights, and trademarks are completely different, right?
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Trademark is to be able to claim ownership of a product.
Meaning, you can actually build a reputation.
Basically, if I buy a Lenovo Thinkpad x230, I don't want it to actually be a Packard Bell netbook.
That is what trademarks are about.
So, no, pretty much nothing like patents.
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Trademarks are a form of intellectual property that serves branding. A company may use their trademark to prevent anyone from using their branding in their own products without consent through licensing. Think franchises, or all the random crap that has Disney movie themes or Hello Kitty all over them.
Patents are a form of intellectual property that serves "inventions". A company may use their patent to prevent anyone from using the patented "invention" in their own products without consent through licen
Re: I sure hope this means... (Score:2)
You can't have a variable time limit for patents based on when it might become obsolete because you can't predict the future that accurately. That would be a silly idea.
People who hate the idea of IP are living on a different planet.
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It's quite telling when people on /;. who call themselves "intelligent" and "smart" and wish computer users would learn how to code or be
Re:I sure hope this means... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I sure hope this means... (Score:5, Interesting)
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How do you plan to execute x86 binaries on an ARM CPU?
Should Valve seek a port of Steam to Android, it'll probably work the same way games are released for Windows, OS X, and desktop Linux: through a recompile from source.
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And when you consider the fact that one of the biggest draws of SteamOS is the streaming capability, having a low-powered ARM client actually makes sense.
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it'll probably work the same way games are released for Windows, OS X, and desktop Linux
The fact that they all run the same architecture? Hint: x86 not ARM.
You don't actually think a game that requires a GPU that takes probably an order of magnitude more power than an entire ARM device is just a recompile away do you?
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There's nothing stopping NVIDIA creating a SteamBox using a Tegra with a massive GPU.
There's two things. First, no ARM core would keep up with it. Second, the IP for their massive GPUs is laden with agreeements with assholes like Microsoft.
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There's nothing stopping NVIDIA creating a SteamBox using a Tegra with a massive GPU.
There's two things. First, no ARM core would keep up with it. Second, the IP for their massive GPUs is laden with agreeements with assholes like Microsoft.
I disagree. If 8 Bobcat derived cores can handle the PS4/XBox One, then a collection of high end ARM cores can handle a decent GPU (doesn't need to be Titan level). Also, NVIDIA already have their Kepler cores freed up for licensing [anandtech.com] so that won't be a roadblock for integrating with ARM.
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If 8 Bobcat derived cores can handle the PS4/XBox One, then a collection of high end ARM cores can handle a decent GPU
That does not follow. Jaguar (the bobcat derived you were talking about) is still an x86 architecture. It also includes many of the fancy x86 features. Why do you think everyone is using x86 for these things? Because it is up to the task now. They don't have to design/fab some complex new ARM design that no one knows how to use just to compete with what already exists in the x86 space. Remember how well Cell worked out for IBM and Sony?
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Remember how well Cell worked out for IBM and Sony?
The Cell is not a general purpose chip. ARM is. There's plenty of games out there already for iOS/Android so the architecture isn't a roadblock.
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ARM is capable of performing at or near Jaguar levels.
That's something you are going to have to back up.
There's plenty of games out there already for iOS/Android so the architecture isn't a roadblock.
Plenty of games out there for 68K too. That does not mean it is as capable is x86. I do not care what games you play on your phone. They are not the same class as big PC games like Half Life. It is a simple fact that x86 has more raw power than ARM. There is no technical reason ARM could not be improved to a point that it is as powerful as x86 but it is not there now.
Architecture is a roadblock when one architecture provides serious performance gains.
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ARM is capable of performing at or near Jaguar levels.
That's something you are going to have to back up.
Comparison here. [anandtech.com] Okay, so the gap is a bit bigger than I remembered, but it's still in a similar ballpark. Unfortunately I couldn't find a more exhaustive comparison between them right now.
There's plenty of games out there already for iOS/Android so the architecture isn't a roadblock.
Plenty of games out there for 68K too. That does not mean it is as capable is x86. I do not care what games you play on your phone. They are not the same class as big PC games like Half Life. It is a simple fact that x86 has more raw power than ARM. There is no technical reason ARM could not be improved to a point that it is as powerful as x86 but it is not there now.
Architecture is a roadblock when one architecture provides serious performance gains.
Is Battlefield 3 [androidandme.com] on Tegra 5 capable enough for you?
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Okay, so the gap is a bit bigger than I remembered, but it's still in a similar ballpark.
Ignoring the fact that a JavaScript benchmark isn't that useful in comparing gaming performance we still have one of the most modern and most expensive ARM chips having 60% less performance than one of the cheapest and weakest modern x86 chips. I'm not sure you can count that as ARM being in a similar ballpark as x86.
Is Battlefield 3 [androidandme.com] on Tegra 5 capable enough for you?
If that video was any indication? Absolutely not. If Valve released a flagship Half Life 3 that looked like that no one would ever take them seriously again. Low poly environments, no anti-a
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https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stainlessgames.carmageddon&hl=en [google.com]
Granted, it's a port of an older game, but graphically intensive nonetheless.
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Carmageddon?! That's your example? An MS-DOS game? An older game indeed. I don't think people are going to be lining up to buy a device that will only play 16 year old games.
You and the rest of the world may have a largely different definition of "graphically intensive".
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You and the rest of the world may have a largely different definition of "graphically intensive".
You obviously have not played the port; there have been some upgrades. It's no Crysis, but it's also not the blocky, 10-pixel crapfest it was 14 years ago, either.
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there have been some upgrades
Making the texture resolution a little bigger and turning on smooth-shading and anti-aliasing is still not graphically intensive.
It's no Crysis
You're damn right it's not. It's also no Half Life 1 yet you are using it as an example of how Half Life 3 will work on an ARM system.
Carmageddon is in no way graphically intensive by today's standards (or any standards in the last 10 years). That is why you see it on a phone.
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Not being a code monkey myself, I will have to take your word on that.
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So, what I "honestly believe" that people are going to do is: buy the fucking SteamBox console that's cheaper than their PC, plug it into the TV in their
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Re:I sure hope this means... (Score:5, Interesting)
How much do you want to bet SteamOS can be launched via live CD? Who says that Live CD can't be the HL3 disc? Seems rather logical to me. If you get a digital download they could just put a "burn me a live CD" right in the steam client... or offer to install a boot loader for you. All very easy.
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I'll bet you thousands of dollars it won't be. It would go completely against the point of Steam to then require you to burn the game and run it that way. The whole point of Steam is to not need CD media to install and run a game.
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You don't need one. It's just an option. You can run it on windows, you can run it on linux, you can boot to the CD. Whatever you want.
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Or it will just install as every other game on Steams does rather than something stupid like what you posit?
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There is an update and you must download and burn a new disc to continue playing this game.
That, among many other reasons, is why such a thing would not work as a live CD. Messing with a user's bootloader when the user has no idea what that is is not "very easy". It is a sure path to failure.
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You haven't used many live CDs have you? Yes you can run purely from the CD, and yes, then you can't save anything. But most allow you to save to hard disk just like any other OS. You can save your updates there, as well as your games. And the idea that "Messing around with the boot loader is not very easy" is just silly. every modern Linux distro out there offers to install a bootloader for you if you already have windows. It rarely causes problems and people who have no idea what they are doing successful
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You haven't used many live CDs have you? Yes you can run purely from the CD, and yes, then you can't save anything. But most allow you to save to hard disk just like any other OS.
I've used them extensively. Where is your live CD going to save stuff on the harddrive? Is it going to just make itself a partition? Or are you expecting gamers to figure this out without constantly breaking their machines?
And the idea that "Messing around with the boot loader is not very easy" is just silly. every modern Linux distro out there offers to install a bootloader for you if you already have windows. It rarely causes problems and people who have no idea what they are doing successfully complete installs all the time.
If you are installing Linux then you either have an idea of what a bootloader is or can quickly figure it out but most likely you have fairly intricate knowledge of how the bootloader works because you've had it broken multiple times in the past. If you work a lot with multi-boot syste
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Also not all PCs have CD-ROM drives.
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You know what the most popular upgrade among gamers now is? An SSD boot drive, because hard drives are too slow for us. Do you think anyone's going to regularly boot Steam off a medium slower and more sequential than a hard drive, when most gamers who can are fleeing towards SSDs at least for the boot drive?
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Who said it would boot entirely off the CD? That's just the boot loader, which will then ask to either create a partition on your HDD or maybe just create a single file like PuppyOS does.
Trust me, there are dozens of linux distros out there already doing this, it's crazy simple and you can hardly tell the difference between the live CD and a normal boot.
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There's little point in dual-booting to SteamOS. SteamOS is aimed at Steambox computers that don't even have Windows.
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That's well within the "My dad could do this" spec.
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I don't think they'd require SteamOS for anything. But it's not a secret that they'll be launching their own living-room console "soon". Having big game title exclusives to plug it with is standard tradecraft.
And I don't mean "exclusive to the Steam console at the expense of Steam on a PC", I mean "exclusive to Steam at the expense of PS4, WiiU and XBone". The Steam console is pretty much exclusively a vehicle with which to get more people to buy games via the Steam store. Odds are Valve will even need to s
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Half-Life 3 Confirmed (Score:5, Funny)
Half-Life 3 Confirmed
First Duke Nukem Forever, now this... (Score:5, Funny)
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We'll always have the year of linux on the desktop. They won on servers, tablets and getting there on phones but still no desktop.
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There's always GNU\Hurd
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We'll be left with no speculationware to joke about pretty soon, looks like.
Compared to DNF, HL3 is a bit different though: Valve itself has yet not officially promised or advertised anything (unless you really want to count the cliffhanger at the end of HL2EP2). So it's only speculation among fans, unlike DNF which received a bunch of screenshots with a good dose of hype every now and then.
I guess (Score:2)
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Yawn.... (Score:1)
Probably the actual news here: Another 3rd party graphics engine to be released soon. Tech demo will be charged for. Next generation of team fortress is here.
Let's hope they do something different this time around...
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Great Way to Promote Steambox (Score:5, Interesting)
Episode 3 (Score:2)
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Valve originally stated they had plans to release new episodes for HL2 approximately every 6 to 8 months, with episodes 1 to 4 already planned. When this window passed without the third episode, many speculated that Valve had abandoned the episodic strategy and are working on an entirely new game.
From an interview in 2006 [kotaku.com]
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Since the release of Half-Life 2: Episode Two in October 2007, there has been very little news from Valve on the next Half-Life game. Half-Life 2: Episode Three, the third and final instalment of the Half-Life 2 episodes, was expected to follow soon after Episode Two, as Valve had stated that they aimed to release a new episode every six to eight months
You don't call something released 7 years later a new episode.
Re:Episode 1 (Score:3)
Re: Episode 1 (Score:5, Informative)
I've unlessed my george lucas, your move, creep!
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No one outside valve is sure but the suspicions are that what was originally targeted to be episode 3 grew and evolved into a project too large to be called an "episode"
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So in other words, to put that in normal software development parlance, it was a victim of scope creep?
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Why did Valve even bother? (Score:1)
Does this mean that, if someone had released a game called "Half-Life 3" before this trademark was filed, Valve wouldn't have been able to sue them for trademark infringement?
If the answer is "yes, Valve would have been unable to sue" then the system is really prone to squatting.
If the answer is "no, Valve could have successfully sued the maker of a game called 'Half-Life 3' based on Valve's ownership of the 'Half-Life' trademark," then why did they even bother filing? Doing so doesn't give them any new ca
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Valve could have successfully sued the maker of a game called 'Half-Life 3' based on Valve's ownership of the 'Half-Life' trademark," then why did they even bother filing?
Firstly, suing someone would cost many times over what simple trademark registration costs.
Doing so doesn't give them any new capabilities (they can still effectively protect the name with their existing trademark registration), takes time and money, and forces them to give away information on a future product (e.g. allowing competitors plenty of time to act on the information, or reducing the time window when the project's existence is a secret and they can decide to delay or kill it without disappointing fans).
Secondly, Valve would be dissapointing fans anyhow if they decided to kill off continuing half-life series regardless if they had never(still actually havent) announced it.
Thirdly, I feel sorry for the poor EA CEO's and whatnot who didn't see Valve eventually possibly coming out with HL3.
w00t! (Score:2)
Hard Sell (Score:2)
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When was the last time anyone in the mainstream focused on "the story?"
The recipe usually goes something like:
HL3 Will Suck (Score:2)
HL1 was great.
HL2 was okay. Episode 1 was poop. Episode 2 was okay.
HL3 will suck.
It all makes sense, of course. With each Half Life there's only half of the original(ity) left.
Not in US? (Score:5, Funny)
There is no equivalent trademark on record at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Maybe that's because their office is closed.
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(see Apple biting themselves in the butt recently).
I'd love to. Where are the images?
Coming soon, look out for (Score:2)
Fine, I'll do it (Score:2)
I can't believe no one has said it yet, but I guess I'll be the one.
Damnit Gabe just take my fucking money. Take it now!
It shouldve ended with Ep 2 anyway (Score:2)
The story ran its course and Gordon won. The writing had gotten much less interesting than the first 3 parts. Episode 2 had the "rescue the girl" and "emotional daddy death" that I had predicted the instant I met those characters. It was still fun, but that ending was a slapped on setup for a sequel you'd expect from any franchise fishing for a reason.
It's been so long... (Score:5, Funny)
I hope they can get the same voice actor for Gordon.
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*Whoosh*
He doesn't have a voice.
He's never said anything and is the epitome of the silent protagonist.
Unless I'm mistaken, he doesn't even grunt when hurt or when jumping.
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Unless I'm mistaken, he doesn't even grunt when hurt or when jumping.
I can at least remember him saying "hfffffft" when hurt by fire.
Q- Why do they have to trademark their sequels? (Score:2)
It makes sense for a company like Square to trade mark a game like Chrono Cross (Chrono Trigger sequel) because its a different name. But for games like Half-Life, Final Fantasy, GTA, MGS, I just don't get it. If I, or anyone else no matter how rich, tried to independently release a game called Half-Life 3 I'm sure
Was expecting with Steam's Announcement (Score:2)
Bryan Cranston is now available (Score:4, Insightful)
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Now you're thinking with Portmans!
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I filed for a trademark on Hot-Grits 3.
That's fine, I've trademarked the Naked and Petrified expansion pack.
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Of course, getting die-hard Half-Life fans out of the woodwork and interested after all this time might be difficult.
Somehow, I doubt that.
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I'm the parent poster and I'm one of them. I was a kid when HL1 was release and in Uni by HL2. Now I've got a job, family and less of an interest in gaming than I used to. The time-frame for when the franchise might have mattered has passed a lot of us now.
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I understand your rationale, but I think the Half-Life franchise has managed to maintain a level of interest on par or greater than franchises like Duke Nukem. Sure there are many who moved on, but it has been shown time and time again that there is still a very large following for the franchise to resume. It might not be all the same individuals from back in the day but it will definitely thrive if and when it comes out.
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You're thinking of patents.
And, really, it's not that easy to confuse them unless you are really daft.
Copyright is about content you've made and covers only *your* content that *you* made.
Patents are about things you've thought of and cover anything that uses that idea in a real-life "machine" (at least in most places, where just having an "idea" of some maths can't be patented).
Trademarks are about your branding and product names, and cover only branding and product names in the same area of business as yo