gamesradar.msn.co.uk — Half-Life developer Valve and publisher Vivendi Universal Games have finally settled their long-running dispute. As part of the settlement agreement, Vivendi will cease distribution of retail packaged versions of Valve's games from 31 August, opening the way for Valve to sell its games exclusively via its Steam download service.
May 2, 2005 View in Crawl 4
loveisregretMay 3, 2005
Personally, I see Steam as a great STARTING POINT for an online distribution system not so much for originally getting the game, but for constantly updating the game with patches and bug fixes, without me having to go find a website that's hosting it. When it comes to keeping my Half Life 2 and Counter Strike: Source copies updated, I have to say Steam does a pretty damn good job.
Closed AccountMay 3, 2005
I like steam, if I loose the discs then im still set. So is there a point to guy out and buying a hard copy?
g_razorMay 3, 2005
This doesn't suck for anyone now. When you bought the game, you had to register it with Steam. (Honestly, that article on Gamesradar is poorly written) Valve could sell little cards that have some kind of code to download it from steam. 56k users are honestly, a small majority among pc gamers. However, I'm sure Valve would do something for this. Could Valve self publish their own games? Not sure why any of you can say "Steam Sucks". What did you want out of it? It serves mostly one purpose, online content distribution. It allows people on an ordinary cable or dsl connection to download a game in an hour.
tripinvaMay 3, 2005
Uh, I live in a very rural area of Virginia (USA) and there's like two people I know that have broadband. One lives an hour away and rides that long to school every day (he didn't like his city's school system) and the other lives close enough to one of the towns to get access off the wireless transmitters on the water towers. The company that provides about half of those in the county is in the process of going out of business. I'm not a gamer simply because the only way you can play with people around here is to load up all your computer stuff and get together in a LAN party. There's about zero chance of broadband showing up here in the next 5 years. 56k actually sounds very nice, considering Verizon refuses to upgrade the phone lines so I can get anything over 26.4k. To sell games like these online like that really cuts out a lot of people I know who like the game. Just about all my friends have Half Life 2. Three of them have broadband. The rest don't. They'd better have a way to get it without the download, or else they'll likely lose a considerable number of people who will either do without or start pirating.
silverMay 3, 2005
I have several issues with Steam. 1. If you're on a 56k modem, downloading it is painful. 2. It's rather sluggish and frequently feels like it's failed to work despite the fact that the process is running in the background. 3. If Value go bust tomorrow and the steam servers close down, your game is practically useless. At least with the CD, you can continue to play it in 10 years time.
capellaMay 3, 2005
or just drag and drop the folder
capellaMay 3, 2005
it doesnt seem like anything is changing. they are still going to have it on shelf. you are still going to have to download updates. whats the diff?