Half-Life 2 Celebrates 20th Anniversary (arstechnica.com) 6
Each day leading up through the 16th (the official day Half-Life 2 was launched), Ars Technica will be publishing a new article looking back at the game and its impact. Here's an excerpt from an article published today by Ars Technica's Kyle Orland: When millions of eager gamers first installed Half-Life 2 20 years ago, many, if not most, of them found they needed to install another piece of software alongside it. Few at the time could imagine that piece of companion software -- with the pithy name Steam -- would eventually become the key distribution point and social networking center for the entire PC gaming ecosystem, making the idea of physical PC games an anachronism in the process.
While Half-Life 2 wasn't the first Valve game released on Steam, it was the first high-profile title to require the platform, even for players installing the game from physical retail discs. That requirement gave Valve access to millions of gamers with new Steam accounts and helped the company bypass traditional retail publishers of the day by directly marketing and selling its games (and, eventually, games from other developers). But 2004-era Steam also faced a vociferous backlash from players who saw the software as a piece of nuisance DRM (digital rights management) that did little to justify its existence at the time. In honor of the anniversary, Orbifold Studios released a new Half-Life 2 RTX trailer. "[T]his is a remastering project that leverages the technologies of NVIDIA's RTX Remix and has the blessing of the original developer, Valve," reports Wccftech. "Orbifold Studios, a team of experienced modders, was founded specifically to bring this project to fruition." It's unclear when exactly this project will be finished.
Nvidia is also giving away a custom Half-Life 2 themed RTX 480 Super Founders Edition.
While Half-Life 2 wasn't the first Valve game released on Steam, it was the first high-profile title to require the platform, even for players installing the game from physical retail discs. That requirement gave Valve access to millions of gamers with new Steam accounts and helped the company bypass traditional retail publishers of the day by directly marketing and selling its games (and, eventually, games from other developers). But 2004-era Steam also faced a vociferous backlash from players who saw the software as a piece of nuisance DRM (digital rights management) that did little to justify its existence at the time. In honor of the anniversary, Orbifold Studios released a new Half-Life 2 RTX trailer. "[T]his is a remastering project that leverages the technologies of NVIDIA's RTX Remix and has the blessing of the original developer, Valve," reports Wccftech. "Orbifold Studios, a team of experienced modders, was founded specifically to bring this project to fruition." It's unclear when exactly this project will be finished.
Nvidia is also giving away a custom Half-Life 2 themed RTX 480 Super Founders Edition.
Darkness (Score:3)
Stop it. You're not helping.
Social Media Crap (Score:3)
In their terms and conditions, "To enter this promotion, you must: Like and comment on any of the posts detailing the builds on GeForce social media channels on X, TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram". Well what if you don't subscribe to any anti-Social Media channels? Looks like a big FU from nVidia for us.
Re: (Score:2)
Even if you do you apparently can't enter yet, at least on faceboot. Where the link goes it says the content is unavailable.
Digital Restrictions Management (Score:1)
DRM has always been about Digital Restrictions Management. The fake "intellectual property" (not a thing) people want to pretend it's about rights... rights that don't exist by law... rights they demand ought to exist, pretend do exist, and sue for the, and lobby to legislate to create.
Intellctual property (IP) is not a thing. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets... and those ARE codified in law. It's not property. There are no titles, liens, etc. It's not intellectual. It's a big