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Tag Archive: Valve

Valve CEO Bashes DRM, Praises Sales

Valve CEO Bashes DRM, Praises Sales

When times get rough, people want cheap entertainment. And when companies deliver, sales skyrocket. In his Thursday keynote speech at the DICE Summit, Valve CEO Gabe Newell made this point loud and clear using examples from his company’s Steam delivery platform.

For instance, after debuting Left 4 Dead at a typical $50 price point, Valve put it on sale for half off shortly after, via Steam. Sales increased by 3,000 percent, outdoing sales at the game’s original launch – a rare feat. Valve also showed a third-party game jumping 36,000 percent in sales with a weekend discount.

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13 Million People are Steam-ing

13 Million People are Steam-ingIf you want proof that the digital distribution of games has become big business, here it is: Steam, one of the leading game distribution platforms, has announced that it’s signed up a staggering 13 million users.

Owned by the game developer Valve, Steam was originally intendedas a method for updating Valve’s multiplayer games. But it’s taken on a life of its own, and these days Steam not only carries over 150 PC games, including Half Life 2, it also has updates to some 2,500 more.

According to Valve co-founder, Gabe Newell, all this is a sign of how important digital distribution of games has become.  Read more...

Valve, Vivendi Reach Settlement

Valve and Vivendi Universal Games (VU Games) today announced the settlement of a pending federal court lawsuit filed by Valve in August 2002. The parties have resolved their differences, and the settlement provides for the dismissal of all claims and counterclaims. Under the settlement agreement, VU Games will cease distribution of retail packaged versions of Valve’s games, including Half-Life®, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike

Valves Gaming System Gets Criticism

Quote from the article:

“There’s no doubt in my mind that Steam is a big load of Steam, but Valve seems to think there’s a need for massive control. I’ve often thought of Valve as another Microsoft greed corporation, but that might be pushing it a bit.

Steam is Valve’s way of trying to control the copyright issues abroad, and with good reason. The internet has brought good and evil for publishing. Software is easily distributed across the internet and easily downloaded by those who know where to find it. So Valve’s main concern was to protect its

Half-Life 2 Source Theft Details Emerge

According to GameIndustry.biz the primary hacker is German, but denies actually stealing the valuable source code.

“While it was confirmed last month that arrests had been made in a number of countries in relation to the source code theft – which was at one point implied to be the cause of the severe delay to the game’s completion, although Valve has since confirmed that they were not close to finishing the game at the time – no detailed information about the suspects or the case against them was released.  Read more...

Half-Life 2 Code Thieves Nabbed

Arrests have been made in several countries related to the break-in to Valve’s network, theft of the Half-Life 2 source code, and release of the source code on the Internet, the company said.

“Within a few days of the announcement of the break-in, the online gaming community had tracked down those involved,” said Gabe Newell, Valve’s CEO. “It was extraordinary to watch how quickly and how cleverly gamers were able to unravel what are traditionally unsolvable problems for law enforcement related to this kind of cyber-crime.”  Read more...

More confusion over Half-Life 2 release

EB Games in the USA now listing the title for a November launch once again.

Last week we reported that Vivendi Universal Games chief executive Christophe Ramboz had stated that the game would be pushed back to 2004 following the illegal distribution of source code from the game online; however, Valve has not officially confirmed this so far.

It’s not clear what information EB Games has used as a basis for its November 27 release slot, but the retailer admits that this date is likely to change before the game actually comes out – so it may just be a best guess estimate.

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Half-Life 2 delayed to 2004

According to Ramboz, the leaked source code – which was taken from Valve’s servers following a concerted hacking effort over the course of several weeks – represents about a third of the total game.

This leak – which included code for Half-Life 2’s anti-piracy and network security systems – is now being blamed for a further delay to the game, which was originally meant to appear on September 30 but was recently pushed back to the holiday season.  Read more...

Half-Life 2 source leaks

Development studio Valve Software has seen the entire source code to Half-Life 2 – including source from some of the company’s middleware partners – leaked to the Internet following a breach in the company’s security.

The source code bundle includes none of the game’s artwork or levels; however, the entire source code for the game itself, its graphics engine and the Havok physics engine, Miles sound system and various other pieces of middleware is being distributed widely as a 30mb zip file.  Read more...

Vivendi to publish Half-Life 2

There had been speculation in recent weeks that Vivendi – whose games division still faces an uncertain future after a widely rumoured Microsoft buyout failed to materialise earlier this year – had lost the rights to Valve’s titles after Activision announced that it would be performing publishing duties on the forthcoming retail version of popular modification Day of Defeat.

However, the game will not appear on the Vivendi stand at E3; instead, it’s being shown off in non-interactive form on ATI’s stand, in a manner very similar to last years unveiling of Doom III.  Read more...

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