I'm never buying another Valve game

[Spaced Cowboy]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

I didn't steal it - I paid A$ 84.95 for the game. As Valve choses to assume that I'm a criminal until I spend my time and money proving otherwise, I'm chosing to take my business elsewhere in future.

Go ahead. Valve has decided that the number of people who decide to not buy another Valve game in the future is offset by detering X amount of pirating.

I really do not see what pirating they were trying to stop. It was cracked in about a week, with a really good one in 2.

Oh you mean me physically loaning my friend my copy after I'm done with it?

[ixnay]

Originally posted by Kassiopeia
With zero resale value, they're still taxing you the full price?! And if you download it directly from them, it's the same price as when getting it through a retailer. You'd think they could lower the massive profit margin even just a a bit to make it more appealing. I'm ever so happy I didn't buy HL2. (I borrowed it from a friend. )

If I remember correctly, the reason it's the same price online as it is in retail is due to the agreement they have with Vivendi, the publisher.

When you buy HL2 over Steam, Vivendi gets no money out of the deal; it all goes to Valve. Now, Vivendi doesn't exactly like this, since Valve could lower their prices over Steam and undercut Vivendi's retail sales significantly. Vivendi sued Valve over something like this and Valve won, I believe.

Anyways, I have never had problems with Steam and I'm going to be buying HL2 tonight after my finals.

[RGBVideo]

I want to pay for the game, but don't want to support projects like Steam. Does anyone know if there is any way I can support Vengeance once I've finished... err, downloading a completely random file made by them which has nothing to do with the topic of this thread? Do they have a swiss bank-account where I can transfer money or something?

[Maquiladora]

Was there an NFO file? Im sure they wouldnt turn down a random donation anyway.

[Skanky Burns]

I'm sure they wouldn't be suspicious either...

[ravagon]

Originally posted by CapTVK

In essence you buy a license, not a piece of software. That copy of HL2 you bought in the store has a resale value of zero the moment you use it.

Umm. If you do buy the license then can you not simply re-sell it?

ie: If you can register steam with a particular cd-key can't you just de-register the same before you sell it?

I just had a quick look at e-bay and there are an awful lot of copies for sale - not all of them unused. There could be quite a few rather irate customers out there.

[Case]

Originally posted by Apocalypse
Do you actually have to be online while you play it? I am wondering because there are still a lot of people (including me while I'm home) who have dialup and only 1 phone line.

No - you can play it offline (which I do - I also have a crappy dial-up connection on my only phone line). However, this is painful to do - there's no 'offline mode default' - you have to chose to play offline every time you load the game, which adds about a minute or so to the time it takes to load.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

So you think it's rational to react to a real threat by punishing genuine customers in place of the pirates, since punishing the pirates is not possible?

That's what usually happens. In the cat and mouse game between pirates and game companies, the companies have to do something. They can't simply say that, hey, people are going to pirate anyway, so we shouldn't do anything about it.

Actually, that's what Brad Wardell does. Does anybody remember his piece on piracy? He was absolutely right about how these harebrained copy protections schemes are going to create more pirates.

[CapTVK]

Originally posted by VJ
I want to pay for the game, but don't want to support projects like Steam. Does anyone know if there is any way I can support Vengeance once I've finished... err, downloading a completely random file made by them which has nothing to do with the topic of this thread? Do they have a swiss bank-account where I can transfer money or something?

Paypal is the favoured system for online transactions but you need a creditcard. If you live in Europe you can also use IBAN which is a sort of international bank account number for the European banking sector (everyone with a European bankaccount has one). Just check your bank for more information IBAN.

The transaction fees are low, far lower than those for paypal.

[DrSpike]

Yeah but do you know their bank account details?

[CapTVK]

Oops, with Vengeance you meant something else than Tribes: Vengeance?

http://www.tribesvengeance.com/us/

[ixnay]

Well, I paid for Half Life 2 and after I finished loading it (since I didn't finish preloading it before its release) I was able to play it.

No problems with it at all, I just clicked "Launch Game" in Steam.

Valve

[Sava]

ixnay

Valve is smart with Steam... it curbs piracy big time. Even I bought this game (HL2... but only for CS:Source )

[Solver]

Even I bought this game, too, and I do not regret it because it's an excellent game... but I do regret having Steam and am glad I got rid of it. I'd pay 10$ more for a version that doesn't have Steam.

[SirOsis]

Originally posted by Apocalypse
Do you actually have to be online while you play it? I am wondering because there are still a lot of people (including me while I'm home) who have dialup and only 1 phone line.

You can be offline to play it. I only have 1 line as well and it works fine. The install takes a long time though. Took me ~2hrs to install and get all the updates.

I would prefer downloading the patches seperately but with steam you can't.