Monday, September 12, 2005
News snippets
Several pieces of news to report following the weekend. The outlook isn’t good, but there are some positive points.
- Day of Defeat: Source was dated, September 26th, and more importantly to TSR priced, at $20. This means that we won’t be seeing Half-Life 2 Bronze reduced to this value as I theorised here in the foreseeable future. It also means Valve are not passing profit increases on to the customer. Make of that what you will. It is still possible that they are keeping package prices up for external reasons, such as not undercutting retailers, but my eyebrows remain firmly raised.
- Half-Life 2: Game of the Year purchasers found error messages followed by constant crashes after registering their products. Valve support staff Doug Valentine stepped into the breach early on Monday with the unprecedented move of phoning someone who had asked about it, then going on the Steam forums to explain. The whole thing has been a vast improvement over the vague second-hand account given by a likely embarrased and frustrated Tim Holt in the aftermath of Steam’s previous centralised issue, the semi-downtime in early February. A later post of Valentine’s confirmed that the problem had been fixed (by 10AM too), and those affected would find a complimentary copy of Condition Zero on their accounts when they next logged in.
- Related is the unfortunate but somewhat inevitable news that the new, EA manufactured retail boxes still include Steam authentication, even for single-player. The inclusion of authentication for these games makes Valve’s stance on Steam’s use clear. Expect something of more substance on this at some point this week.
- One last detail to note is that the new Half-Life anthology, despite costing $20, only contains Half-Life 1 (with Deathmatch), Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and Team Fortress Classic, whereas a copy of the original Half-Life for $10 or less retail or $20 on Steam will give you the whole back catalogue. This is understandable though, as Day of Defeat is still published by Activision and Deathmatch Classic and Ricochet are hardly worth advertising.
