Who shot Nice Guy Gordon?

Is Valve using the power of its fanbase for evil?

By John Gillooly, Atomic

I have a new hobby of coming up with grand conspiracy theories related to Valve and the Half-Life 2 launch. But none of them came close to what has been transpiring over the weekend in the US, where numerous game retailers have abandoned any notion of an official release date for the game and started selling it.

But no-one can actually play the game until Valve flicks the magical switch in Steam HQ that unlocks the authentication servers, a side effect of the requirement to be online for installation of the game. It is certainly a spectacular anti-piracy measurement, but is also a very calculated means of control of the game Half-Life 2 at launch and into the future.

There have been so many little hints and snippets of information that have emerged in the past year that point towards the grand Steam master plan. There has been plenty written on the ongoing legal battle between Valve and Vivendi over the move into online distribution, and the entire pre-release hyping of Half-Life 2 has been micromanaged by Valve's PR department, not Vivendi.

A year ago, when the Valve/ATI bundling love in was in full bloom I was hearing more about the plans for the game's release from my hardware contacts than I was from Vivendi. It was bleedingly obvious that Valve saw ATI as more important than Vivendi to its release of the game, and while the delay of the games release by over a year has meant the ATI relationship has gone off the boil, Valve has stepped up its passive aggressive relationship with Vivendi to the point where the joy that should accompany Half-Life 2's release is being marred by petty infighting and sniping matches.

It peaked on Sunday when the following news post went up on www.steampowered.com in response to the near ridiculous abandoning of the notion of a release date embargo by a large chunk of the worlds game retailers.

'If you have purchased a copy of Half-Life 2, we are sorry you are still waiting to play. This is not Valve's choice. Vivendi is insisting that the game has not yet been released, and has threatened that Valve would be in violation of its contract if we activate the Half-Life 2 Steam authentication servers at this time.
Thanks for your patience and we will update you when we have more news to share.'

Cue angry posts from the at times rabid community of Half-Life fans as they decried Vivendi as the antichrist for stopping them from playing Half-Life 2. But no-one seems to have stopped and read between the lines of the post to even speculate on what is really happening.

Think of the relationship between Vivendi and Valve as the mother of all Mexican standoffs, and ever since Half-Life 2 began preloading on Steam the safeties have come off, and the trigger fingers are getting itchy.

Half-Life 2's preload was a very savvy move to ensure that the hardcore gamers shirked traditional retail channels in favour of Steam. Ever since Valve turned off WON authentication for the original Half-Life gamers have been forced to use Steam to play Counter-Strike. Seeing as this is by far the most popular multiplayer game of its type, it means a huge install base of the Steam application.

Half-Life 2's preload shoved the prospect of being able to play the game the second it was released in front of the largest community of hardcore gamers in the world. And it offered the ability to trickle the game content onto the PC months in advance, but not have to pay for it until it is released, a perfect sideswiping of Vivendi's retail strategy.

While no numbers have been released about the popularity of the pre-load experiment, rumour (http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2004/11/last-pre-release-half-life-2-post.html) has it that the pre-loads exceed 2 million. This is a fair chunk of change that is bypassing Vivendi's pockets (although it is also rumoured that the publisher will get a smaller share from the Steam sales).

This backs Vivendi into a corner, as it struggles to ensure that retail sales will be strong for the title. Valve naturally wants end users to choose the Steam method as it makes more money that way, and has a natural advantage by keeping a tight hold on the reigns of the marketing of the game. Vivendi is so hamstrung it has not even been able to get copies of the game out to magazines like Atomic for review (All reviews have been by journalists flown to Seattle to play the game in Valve's offices).

The moral to this story is that there is a great need to think critically about everything both Valve and Vivendi have said over the past few years, and to not blindly accept the siege mentality coming through in Valve's statements. The 'blame Vivendi' post may well be true, but it has already been widely reported that Valve have threatened Vivendi that they would unlock HL2 on Steam the moment someone tried to activate a retail copy over the network. Given this knowledge, and the potential for even more damage to the sales of boxed copies of the game, it is unsurprising that Vivendi has brought in the lawyers to stop the unlock happening early.

Whatever happens in the next days and hours as the official release time for HL2 approaches, they will certainly be interesting as the rabid fanboys start on a crusade against a publisher that without who Half-Life probably would never have existed (after Valve shopped the original concept to several publishers unsuccessfully it was the legendary Ken Williams of Sierra that saw the potential and signed the game).

My advice is to think critically and don't fall into the same trap that the less informed gamers of the world will. In a few days the bullshit and shenanigans will be forgotten as we finally get to lose ourselves inside City 17, and in the end that is all that any of us want to do. Let's leave the lawyers to decide the whole Valve vs. Vivendi thing.