just wait, it'll be out soon enough

To paraphrase Gabe:

"We make 2.5 times as much money for each purchase on Steam.

Good news i guess. But id rather hear a paragraph with the word "gold" in it..

Question is: how much cheaper will it be on Steam?

"just think about it..
- no packaging
- no color cover
- no printed manual
- no shipping around the world
- no retailer profits
- no CDs
- no copy protection
- and full control about piracy "


Yes, I'm sure the years of developing Steam were free.

I'm torn. Steam is alright now. I'd rather have the CD, but since Steam was able to ressurect my old Half-Life CD key, I'm pretty impressed

So buy it in the store... if a similar thing ever happens to your HL2 disks then you'll be able to resurrect it via Steam... presuming that Steam is still around.

The inverse, however, is not true.

My only hope is that it will go live for steam users when it goes gold since they don't have to ship it.

I've heard that Valve had to sign an agreement with Vivendi saying that they would release it at the same time. It kind of makes sense; releasing it early via Steam would PISS Vivendi off, and they still need to stay on the good side of publishers.

Also, it will probably be the same price (maybe like $5 cheaper).

I'm torn. Steam is alright now. I'd rather have the CD, but since Steam was able to ressurect my old Half-Life CD key, I'm pretty impressed.

My old Half-Life CD got scratched to hell years ago by some a$$hole friend that will remain nameless, and I never bothered buying another one. Just for kicks, I installed Steam and typed in my old CD key, and it unlocked the Half-Life Platinum edition. I was once again able to play HL, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Counter Strike, and a myriad of mods.

But, a CD is always nicer.


"Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you."
-Fry, Futurmama

Where has this been officially confirmed?

Read through this:
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1298

Of course, they may have changed the official line in the past 9 months, but as of last December that's how it was going to work. I stopped reading that thread about then since it was abundantly clear that HL2 wasn't coming out anytime soon.

Question is: how much cheaper will it be on Steam?

just think about it..
- no packaging
- no color cover
- no printed manual
- no shipping around the world
- no retailer profits
- no CDs
- no copy protection
- and full control about piracy

How much you want to bet it'll be just as much. Sure nearly all the costs of the thing will be nulified, but valve still wants to get rich

My only hope is that it will go live for steam users when it goes gold since they don't have to ship it. I have mine pre-loaded as it is
This comment was edited on Sep 8, 05:09.

It is free even if you don't own a vavle game, but the only free game on it is Codename Gordon.

Steam is free. If you have any Valve game you just use it... No monthly fee!

Who could forget Valves big plans for the future of dial-up gaming called "PowerPlay™" ??

you DO remember it don't you?....well?

Oh yes, I do. And they had lots of guys signing up for it and blablabla, until eventually Carmack said "They talk a lot, but they have no detail whatsoever on how this speeding up of theirs is going to work. At some point, you are going to have to send a packet from your computer, through a router, to a server, and back again. Talking about it isn't going to change that."
And ofcourse, he refused to join up, which immediately bombed the entire thing, because everybody else was smart enough to realise that if Carmack said it was a bunch of bullshit, it probably was.

And thus ended PowerPlay. I believe there's still a website out for it somewhere, not updated since 1999 or so.

Creston

Someone mentioned this before in the thread in passing, kudos to you for bringing it up.

I'm supposing a few things here.

1) It costs money to use Steam. Right? There's a fee for it, monthly or so? Edit : Ok, so it doesn't. Slightly modified conspiracy theory here. It will start costing money in the future. There, my theory still works

2) You can only get patches through Steam, right?

If both those are the case, the temptation for Valve to leave a MAJOR bug in the game is becoming massively tempting, isn't it? Let's look back at Black & White's level 5 Creature bug. That made your creature shrink, but never return back to normal.
Lionhead never denied the eventual accusations that that bug was left in deliberately to thwart peeps with a haxx0red copy.
Which, in itself, isn't such a bad idea, but then it took Lionhead 288 months to release a patch, and ofcourse, haxx0rs can easily patch their haxx0red version, and then install a new no-cd patch, so it was a bit of a half assed attempt at thwarting pirates.

If you take that one step further, Valve could have a golden way of forcing everyone onto Steam?

Valve has a HOT property with HL2. Therefore they should have a fair amount of leverage with the distribution channels, i.e. they can make certain demands.

NOBODY in the gaming industry 'makes demands' of publishers. Publishers control 99.999% of all business, with I think only maybe id software as the single exception, and even they are subject to publisher's whims. Without a publisher, you have no advertising, no distribution, no sugar daddy to cough up some money when your game is 80% done and you can't pay the rent, etc.

This is why the gaming industry is in such a sorry fucking state, exactly BECAUSE publishers control everything.
Even Valve is subject to their publisher's whim.

Online distro is the future. What company wouldn't want to cut all of those distribution costs?

The publisher. An average publisher has, what, 300+ people working for it, all of whom do about absolutely fucking nothing besides fuck up games with their ideas of "how it should work". How else are all those weasels going to get paid? Oh wait, I guess there's the guy who designs the box art, the guy who does shitty PR releases that regurgitate every poor quote ever used by other marketing peons, and the guy who copies some CDs. And then, ofcourse, there's the totally inept Q&A / Support department, who might as well be replaced by the AnswerTron 2000 for all the good they do.

They parasites need a HOST BODY to survive on, in this case, the game developer and the game itself. By cutting them out, they'd all dwindle away and die.

God, we should be so lucky. Ie, it will never happen.

Creston

This comment was edited on Sep 7, 20:31.

Half-Life 2 will be released November 2010.
This comment was edited on Sep 7, 19:56.

Zathrus is dead-on as usual. Knowing Valve's previous online efforts (yes Hump, I also remember PowerPlay) there's no way in hell I'm personally ordering HL2 through Steam. I mean, it's human nature to want to physically obtain - while some will go for the online distro thing, I don't see it getting big just yet.

September 15th in what year????!!!!!!!!!!

If Steam blows up at launch then everyone is screwed. Can't connect to Steam, can't play the game. Single player, LAN, or internet multiplayer.

Where has this been officially confirmed?

I've seen people around here asking about the necessity of Steam for single player HL2 but I've never seen an answer...

"...Setup a LAN and a DNS server with having no outside traffic, and you will probably be able to get a nice LAN party going and not worry about having a legit copy.

(obviously not this easy, but a good start)

Don't be so naive about these kinds of things.
Just 2-3 weeks ago Valve and Steam were in the headlines about fake keys and stolen credit card accounts...."

Sure, you and i are able to set up such things, but i am still talking about the masses.
And what gain can the end user get from this (banned) fake keys? or are you messing around with stolen credit card accounts?
I dont think so...

now who is naive here.
It WILL get harder for piracy, dont get me wrong, this must not be a bad thing.
But i fear software prizes will rise without the competition of piracy.
Fact is, a "healthy" piracy is helping us to keep prizes acceptable. And i especially saying "healthy", what we have today is not healthy, thats the reason for all the countermeasures we have seen in the last few years (software activation, SF3, cd key authentification,... steam).

Look at all the console games. sure there is piracy too, but much less comparing to pc. and the prizes...? for such junk...?;)

Even M$ wont be that big w/o piracy.

Sure, Half-Life 2 is the egg, not yet born and released and the chicken is Doom 3 It isnt game of the year until I play it, and even then, the replay factor, mods and ability to create, it longevity is the deciding factor. I have no loyalty to a company or franchise, I play each game based on buzz or whatever peaks my interest and decide then. Too much competition to assume any game is going to be good because its a sequel or a certain company released it. I am really hoping HL2 renews my interest in FPS games because with the exception of Far Cry and Battlefield, not much else in the past couple years has been worth playing.

"Chicken and the egg problem."

I think that everyone can pretty much agree that HL2 will be one of the biggest releases of the year.

Chicken and the egg problem.

It's only going to be one of the biggest releases of the year if it makes it to store shelves. If it doesn't make it to store shelves it's not going to be one of the biggest releases of the year. There's a whole lot of people who simply won't buy something if it's available only via download. There's a much larger group who simply won't know about it unless it's on store shelves. The only way to get it on those shelves is to sign with a distributor big enough to handle the job -- and none of them are going to agree to terms that cut their own throats.

we see TONS of releases of marginal games with little public awareness (think Beyond Divinity, Dominions, Galactic Civilizations, etc.) - are they not making money on those?

Sure we see tons of those. And sure they make money. And the keyword you, yourself, used was "marginal".

Online distro is the future.

That remains to be seen. People have this funny attachment to physical things that cannot be taken away from them, particularly when they've paid money for it. Comparing it to Dell is invalid -- when your HD crashes your entire computer does not vanish.

I guess I keep thinking of things in these terms: I think that everyone can pretty much agree that HL2 will be one of the biggest releases of the year. Valve has a HOT property with HL2. Therefore they should have a fair amount of leverage with the distribution channels, i.e. they can make certain demands. Yes, the distro's get screwed on the deal but wouldn't they rather have 50% of the available distribution profits from the biggest game of the year vs. none of those profits? And yes, while costs may be fixed, we see TONS of releases of marginal games with little public awareness (think Beyond Divinity, Dominions, Galactic Civilizations, etc.) - are they not making money on those?

Online distro is the future. What company wouldn't want to cut all of those distribution costs? Lookit Dell as an example. And store distro will still remain - but at a lower level than it is today.

And what's in it for me? I don't have to deal with all of that pre-order BS, I don't have to trek on down to the store, and I can have it virtually as soon as it's released (bandwidth permitting - the pre-release of the assets should help there).