Just in time for the Half Life 2 preload, my wireless broadband link is working again. So I installed steam... I've already got the preload now, I figure it's a no-brainer. If I want to play Half Life 2 the instant it's released, that's gotta be the easiest way to do it. Anyone think of a good reason for a store-bought copy? If it's for backups, heck, I can burn CDs of the content folder.

So anyway, I'm futzing around with Steam and it lets me punch in a CD key from the original Half Life, and starts downloading the thing. I let it finish, thinking it would be a kick to play the original half-life again before HL2 comes out. What's cool is that the original Half Life CD key unlocked a bunch of other Half Life mods including the Opposing Force mission pack. Very nice of them to do that, saves me from having to punch in my Opposing Force CD key.

Anyway, so I get into Half Life again, and of course this time I can play the thing at 1280x1024 with no slowdowns because my system and my video card are so much more advanced. But I'm now asking myself... Were the textures really *THAT* low-rez in the original half life? It all looks so primitive compared to the stuff you see these days. I remember thinking how cool the tram ride was, and now I watch it and it's like... Everything seems so blocky and muddy compared to what I remembered.

Wonder what games will be like ten years from now, if we'll look back at Far Cry and Doom 3 and go "wow that was so primitive..."

So essentially, you're saying that the first Half Life, looks like Doom 3 today, right? Damn, I've had hardware capable of playing the latest games for the past few years, yet I don't ever have any time to load anything and play. The last thing I played, believe it or not, was Monkey Island 4 (not including Beneeath a Steal Sky on my iPaq).

Bruno

Well, 4 was a console port, so you gotta give 'em that. I just think the writing was a lot funnier and more clever in the first 3.

I don't like the thought of relying on a service from a company who has no security sense to buy my games. The fact that a hacker comprimised their entire network by sending Gabe an e-mail that infected his system through Outlook doesn't make me confident my credit card information will be safe.

I also don't like how steam gets in the way with attempts to LAN play games I paid for. Why does it feel the need to connect to the internet to verify things, and block access if it can't get to the internet? It's been a common issue at Quakecon these past two years. "I want to play Half Life multiplayer, and I get this steam error" and the Helpdesk will respond "Your screwed until your machine connects to the internet again."

Hm. Very valid points.

I'm sure you're not the only person with those issues. Has Valve tried to address them at all?

I have one additional concern, it's the "slowhacking" thing. Not a steam-specific concern, more a valve-network-code concern...

For those who haven't heard about it, "slowhacking" is when a server administrator is running a special adminstration kit from Valve. It allows them to alter a connected client's game configuration file from the server console. Originally, it was for helping newbies change their "rate" or "maxdecals" commands, or to edit the screen name of someone who puts something offensive in there. But some server admins can abuse it, such as remapping the user's keyboard layout, or to alter the network connection settings so that the client can never connect to another one of those game servers without deleting or fixing his config file.

Valve's response to that is "set your config.cfg to read-only". Which is fine, but what if the person is a newbie and doesn't know how. Or what if I don't like having to go out to Windows every time I want to alter my own configuration.

Did you try Codename Gordon? It's a pretty basic 2d engine, but it seems to be using many features similar to HL2.

I've been using Steam for about a year now, I'm all for not having to go purchase the retail packaging. Hopefully overtime it will lower the costs of new releases a bit.

I Steamed it over the weekend. I couldn't help myself. Half-Life 2 (drool)

I really hope they decide to unlock it over Steam before Nov 16. It just doesn't make any sense to make Steam people wait till the retail release. What's the point?

By the way, the earlier complaint about how the offline mode doesn't work... They did fix that one in a Steam update a while back. The problem in the past was that people would accidentally choose the "Exit and Sign Out" option instead of just "Exit", meaning that offline mode wouldn't work the next time they tried it. So they simply removed the option for signing out. So that offline mode will now always work (in theory).

Ah yes, the legislate-against-innovation method of protecting your dying business. I love it.

Well, so far, it's not legislate-against-innovation yet. It's more like Valve trying to protect their own neck while simultaneously architecting the coming revolution. But I see your point.

If by a while back you mean before August, it didn't work. There were people at Quakecon who were working fine, then it randomly decided it needed an internet connection.

So it seems to me the fact that you have to prove you have a license to use your software when you download it but don't when you purchase it in the store seems like reason enough to go to the store to me.

Oh, and just to be complete here, I went ahead and purchased HL2 via Steam when they made the purchases available. Mostly because I wanted to try out the Source engine with the Counter-Strike:Source game and see how it performed on my hardware. The answer being: Very nicely, thank you.

And in the process, got a bit hooked on Counter-Strike:Source. I don't know exactly why, I never really liked the original Counter-Strike, but I really do enjoy playing Counter-Strike:Source. I think it's because the user interface is simpler and cleaner, and everything is so much more clear. There's a lot less confusion about things. There's only one type of Terrorist and one type of Counter-Terrorist, so you don't have that class selection screen, and there's less confusion about who is your friend and who is your foe. When I center my crosshairs on someone, I can see instantly whether they're a friend or a foe. In regular CS, it's all a big mess on the screen.

However, CS:S has some incredibly serious problems that have soured my experience. It's terribly buggy for a 1.0 release, and there is no anti-cheat functionality in place yet.

Problems I've seen with CS:S are...

1. Players can crash every client on a server simply by naming themselves "%n" and then getting killed. That's a real pain, being mid-game and getting an unchecked buffer crash. That's just sloppy.

2. Many of the developer-mode console commands that were intended to help debug the rendering engine never got tagged as cheat codes. So there are built-in cheat console commands with the final shipping version. You can, for example, see players through walls with a couple of the codes, or reverse the Z order of the rendering pipeline. That makes playing on a server frustrating, knowing that the 12-year old kids can see you before you can see them.

3. I saw a player that was freely speeding around the map and moving through walls as if they were in Spectator mode, but they were able to participate in the game and shoot other players. For instance you would start a round, and almost instantly the guy would show up and start shooting you at your own base. Now THAT made me upset.

4. The voice chat system works great when people are using it as part of the game. But then there are 12-year olds who think it's funny to spam garbage into the microphone. And the user interface for muting a noisy player takes about three clicks too many and requires that you remember their name in your head after you've gone two levels into a menu system.

But the biggest problem I saw with Steam so far has been the problem that Tod ran into...

He had the ATI coupon saying he gets HL2 for free. And he wanted to use the coupon, but he wanted the Silver package, meaning he'd be charged ten bucks instead of getting the package for free. But nowhere on the card or the Steam purchase screens did it actually tell him how to redeem the coupon for the Silver package. So he ended up paying full price on the Silver package and never got prompted for his coupon code. And emails to Valve billing have met with callous boilerplate "no refunds" responses, and he's being forced to dispute the credit card charge instead of getting a simple fix from Valve. That's very poor customer service right there.

If they want to champion this mode of content distribution, they need to treat it with as much reverence as they do the boxed games... Such as not shipping an unfinished version, and treating the paying customers with some respect.

My fears were confirmed. Steam is required period, even to play the single player game from a store bought copy. Combined that with the DVD version costing $80, looks like I'll skip this one.

Too much hype for much good to come out of it. Valve moving to skip the publisher is only going to do more harm to the industry then good, and I will have no part of it.

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Valve moving to skip the publisher is only going to do more harm to the industry then good

I disagree with this statement in the strongest, yet most respectful, terms.

The publisher has merely been a vehicle to WalMart for most makers. They've been able to leverage the need for shelf space into an unbelievable large percentage of game revenue. They've used this inherent "bent-over" position of the makers to wield the cancellation sword over games of which they have little or no knowledge.

Isn't it enough that the publishers have built a system of horrendous customer service, hype, and political positioning? Within this structure, little or no innovation can be found.

I don't agree with Gabe's "phuck the contracts" attitude, but publishers are much of the reason for the mailaise that we see in game design.

Game publisher = RIAA. They are the same species. They are trying to protect an anachronistic market through lawsuits, predation and just plain-ole bad business dealings. They are sharks who provide little service to the customer.

Bring on the direct distribution of games. I, for one, will embrace it and enjoy the best that gaming has to offer while others...will not.

Ok, theoretical situation. You could make all the game publishers just disappear tomorrow. What would that do? My view of it is this:

1. Since only some developers are widely popular and sit on a decent amount of cash, we would see just tons of sequels. Half Life 10 anyone?

2. With noone to fund new games, we would see the market settle even more into a genre rut then it is now. The developers would be too afraid to try something new, since if it fails, the company would be gone even if they had past success.

3. Existing development companies would be bogged down with support calls and would have to hire people to take them. They would also have to hire more IT staff to manage the multiplayer services themselves, and all of a sudden you have a large company to make one game. Game doesn't sell a million copies, they are gone.

I do think most game publishers do screw over the developers in a bad way. Well, I more then think that, I know that from my own personal experience. But simply getting rid of them is not the answer.

The ideal publisher would be one similar to Gathering of Developers, but with more business sense. I highly agreed with how they ran things, they just never got that blockbuster title they needed to stay afloat with their .com like spending tendencies.

The RIAA does need to go, since people can just make a CD with a few insturments and a computer now. However, a game still costs millions to make and a bunch of time. Vaporizing the funding source for that kills the industry.

Sorry, but <nazi type="grammar">you've been using "then" instead of "than" a lot lately.</nazi>

I didn't quite mean it that way, so I guess I sould clarify it a bit.

In general, the cost to produce music has gone down drasticially since music started to be sold on records. Meanwhile, game costs have risen dramaticially over the old days from the Pong era. To say we need to get rid of the game publishers and equating them to the RIAA doesn't make sense when the two industries are going in opposite directions. Also, the RIAA does have a lot of musical control, however, it would be better to say record labels = game publishers. The closest thing the game industry has to the RIAA is the ESRB group.

The Valve/Vivendi situation is a mess. I think it is an important one to watch though, as what happens there could change the game industry drasticially. Personally I don't see a good guy on either side in it.

I understand you arguments and agree to a certain extent, although I'm not nearly as much into games as you are, but at least Valve has produced a product that is entertaining. I'm as far as HL2 is concerned, Vivendi is provding them with nothing, AFAIK. I doubt Valve needed cash from them to produce the game, and they probably don't need any promotion for it. Word of mouth is going to be good enough in this case. So I don't see Valve wanting to avoid publishers as a bad thing for them, at least at this time.

But what you're saying, I think, is that other game developers will see what Valve is doing and decide to publish their games by themselves (via whatever technology). I think that most companies realize that that would be a bad idea, as one misstep could, as you describe, close the company for good. (Of course, you could have a separate company for each game, so if it goes bankrupt, you just start another, but that's another story rife with problems.) The real problem, I think, comes in the notion that game publishers will start to wonder where their money's gone. In many cases, game cash cows are sequels. It certainly seems to be the case this year. People were and are clamoring for such games as HL2, Doom 3, Halo 2, etc. And this is where companies make their money. But if a developer becomes big enough to have that much pre-release interest, they could go it on their own. And that leaves publishers' easy money nowhere to be found. Which means that the game publishers might decide that the market is too risky for the reward available.

Of course, none of this touches on the distribution. It's "easy" for PC game developers. Virtually everyone that's going to want to play their games has sizable bandwidth. But what about console games. I suppose it'd be possible for the XBox to download games to its hard drive, but new technology would need to be developed there, and it'd have to get installed somehow. But as for the other systems, you'd still need to buy a physical product. I suppose you could be required to download CD images and burn them. But chances are that you'd really need a physical product. And that means distribution, and, right now, publishers take care of that. What happens if the publishers go away and all of a sudden the game stores have to deal with each individual game developer to get product? That's a nightmare. (For reference, Marvel Comics, easily the larget comics publisher, decided to forego distributors about ten years ago and require stores to buy straight from them, which they did, because that was the ony way they could get it and not carrying Marvel Comics would be a death blow for a comics store. Even with all of that, and the fact that stores still only had to deal with two distrubition entities, their self-distribution scheme fell apart within a year.)

And then there's the casual gamer. Being reqiuired to perform any of the steps above to the casual gamer (downloading massive images and burning CDs,) are probably enough to make them just not bother. And the casual gamer, while not respected in the gaming field, is still a significant portion of sales. Not to mention the fact that while every gamer is going to know about HL2, not ever casual gamer is. (Not that that's a good example, since you'll apparently have to have a separate 4GHz workstation on an AGP card in order to play the thing anyway.) And if they have to download it, how will they even know that it exists? And we're back to promotion, which is something that the developers don't know how to do.

Anyway, I'm not sure what my point is, which is surprising considering I've rambled on for pages and pages. Just more to consider, I guess.

Quote:
The only place where making games is still like making records today...

I hope this discussion is merely an extension of my loose equivlance of the RIAA to game publishers. I wasn't trying to say that the game industry is the same as the music industry. On the contrary, I was trying to point out that many of the RIAA players are very similar in their business model and practices as game publishers.

There are some hugely popular games that have been made by a small group of people, in some cases even one. Counter Strike is a perfect example. It was originally put together by a couple of guys at home. Yes, it's a mod, but you could argue that fact about many games that use licensed technology (especially full-engine packages like LithTech, Unreal, Quake and now Source). Sure, Valve threw people at the mod to port it to Source, but for the past five years it's remained largely unchanged during its reign as the "most played online game".

The game industry is probably more similar to the movie industry than the music industry. Piracy is rampant, a few big companies make most of the industry decisions regarding "creativity" and which projects get the green-light and distribution channels are almost monopolized. Unfortunately, the game industry is still struggling for legitimacy despite US$7B in sales mostly because of its inherent appeal to a younger audience. Other problems continue to plague the industry as well, such as the "don't hire anyone over 30" attitude and associated low pay scale which combine to cause a decidely less mature and less respectable environment (at least as seen from the outside world).

All of this aside, the bottom line for me is this: If I can get the same game online, especially if it's a few bucks cheaper, all the better for me.

Just gotta love those ragdoll physics in the Source engine.

(Please note that the attached photo is a body at rest, hence my ability to capture it from multiple angles during gameplay.)

Hmmm, a well placed hook perhaps?

ROFL

"That's GOTTA hurt!"

Dude, Spiderman.