I'm a regular visitor to BluesNews but this is my 1st time posting.
Valve certainly have some big probs at the moment, but there's a few things that bother me over this whole HL2 delay/leak thing.
1. Valve say that Gabe had someone accessing their mail systems etc several weeks ago. This would explain thew recent hoax emails sent out to several sites saying the game "would" still be released on thee 30th Sept - BUT, if I was a hacker with intimate access to all Gabes emails I would have known that the game had been delayed weeks ago so I'm surprised that this was never leaked.
2. The recent ATI launch event was supposedly going to be spearheaded by HL2. Even the location & date appears to have been chosen with this in mind. Seems strange to go to all that trouble for a game that wasn't ready to be released/shown. These events are VERY expensive and I can't see that ATI would have made such a big investment about HL2 without substantial assurances from Valve that the game would be ready to release. Those that did attend the event have commented on the fact that it's not at all what they were expecting (i.e. to see HL2 in all it's glory)
3. Why was only the source code stolen?. I'm not expert but I don't see why Gabe would only have JUST uncompiled source code on his machine - I'd imagine that it's unusable without the content!? (Unless of course the whole game HAS been stolen but not released yet !)
4. I found it strange that Gabe went into so much detail as to how the code was taken. Most companies would try and cover themselves by being a little more vague - May only prove how upset Valve are over this whole episode.
With ref to 1, I personally believe that HL2 *WAS* completed and ready for it's official launch at the ATI event on the 30th Sept, but the realisation that the source code had been stolen completely screwed everything up.
This may also explain why the game was delayed just a week from it's release date.
Some have said that the reason the code was stolen in the 1st place was as revenge for Valve delaying the game - but at the time of the intrusion into Vale's systems the game was still on course for it's Sept 30th release. Add to that the fact that whoever hacked their mail server appears to have been unaware of any delay (or I suspect they would have leaked this info), then I suspect that the delay of the game is a result of the leak and not the other way round.
Some may say "release the game anyway and then patch it" in order to get around any online cheats that may come from the leak but I don't believe that would work - if you have the source code you can work out what's been patched and work round it. The only real way to fix this is to re-write some of the code from scratch so I'm afraid that we're probably going to have to wait some time for Hl2 to be released.
On the positive side, the new "holiday" release date was made AFTER Valve knew what had happened so they've probably taken this into account. So hopefully we're not looking at a 2004+ release date at least.......Hopefully anyway.
3.