I wanted to get a new system for Half-Life 2.
However, my job is flaky :-( so no new system yet!
Thanks for the delay, Valve :-)
Actually I don’t plan to get my new system until the game has been on the shelf for at least a couple of weeks… I don’t have to be first in line to play the thing…
Cheers!
Is “shoot yourself in the foot” a euphemism for less sales? I can’t quite picture the analogy of Valve’s collective foot in severe pain as the internet has exploded with talk of Half-Life 2’s new release date. Again.
So you’re saying it’s ok in business to make statements you can’t back up so long as it generates publicity and sales?
Lol, dosen’t it always seem to go that way!
Isn’t the ‘Troika’ vampire game using the HL2 engine? I don’t know the status of that game, but if it’s done we won’t be seeing it until after HL2 basks in the limelight awhile.
Can’t have a second cousin stealing your girl. :lol:
I’m concerned that Half-Life 2’s delay was forced by malnourished developers after Gabe Newell’s daily raids on the cafeteria. :shock:
“The problem is that, well, I just don’t trust them. At all. I stopped reading them for news when (A) a friend suggested that I was reading a tabloid, (B) I realized this friend was RIGHT.”
You didn’t notice they were tabloids?
FYI - Weekly World News is also a tabloid, just in case you didn’t notice that as well.
No. Whether you or I think it’s “OK” or not is irrelevant. Irrelevant unless the customers actually revolt because of all that flak. Giving Valve your game industry expert advice about what they should’ve done is equally silly.
Also: No, I don’t think they picked a false date purely for publicity reasons, but publicizing the best case scenario date sure didn’t hurt, which is what some people are implying. The hurt of flak.
:lol: :lol: :lol:
-shrug- I didn’t trust the Register even when I DID read it. I never thought of it as less than, say, middle to high end pseudo-sleaziness. It took someone else’s prompting for me to realize that there really wasn’t a distinction between the two.
EDIT: Besides, there’s something inherently contradictory about a tabloid about computers. The idea just flies right under the radar, sort of how it seems to be missed by a whole bunch of news sites that should really know better.
No. Whether you or I think it’s “OK” or not is irrelevant. Irrelevant unless the customers actually revolt because of all that flak. Giving Valve your game industry expert advice about what they should’ve done is equally silly.
It’s not strawman, you are suggesting that it was good publicity to commit “in stone” a date which they could not deliver. The game would not have been any less hyped about or publized had they given a more flexible deadline, but now they’ve lost their credibility. Does it mean a loss of sales? Probably not, but again I’m arguing that the egg on their face was completely avoidable.
I can’t remember the last time a company has ever given such a gutsy release date for a game and this is exactly why.
edit: Let me make my intention clear: I don’t want it to become a habit for companies to announce dates in this manner.
Sure. They had to have known. Everyone else pretty much already knew that the 9/30 release date was BS when STEAM came out of limited beta and was just as unstable and incapable of delivering the necessary bandwidth as it was several months earlier when the limited beta first started. This will also be known as The Day the World Went “Duh”.
The TF2 debacle, the constantly late and underwhelming patches, the stupidity of the current netcode, the general worthlessness of VAC, the complete trainwreck that is STEAM… I think i’ll “delay” my purchase of HL2 indefinitely and maybe give my $50 to a company that has their shit together.
Gabe Newell let us know that the ‘news’ posted on Shacknews yesterday (story) is a fake and that Half-Life 2 has gone Gold and in production now. Here’s the official word: “The release will still remain on schedule for Sep 30th. People who have pre-orded it via Steam will still get it before the Sep 30th but we are currently ironing out a couple of bugs, people may have seen Half Life 2 yesterday for a minute on it while we were in our testing stages (…) The SDK will be available for download tomorrow 2.00pm EST. Now you’ve heard it from the horses mouth so rest assured. More news to follow on Sep 26th so watch this space.”
This whole saga is so funny. I mean, I am totally psyched for HL2 and hope it comes out looking good on 9/30. But I can’t remember ever seeing (1) this sort of breathless reporting on a game’s release date or (2) this kind of whipsawing on when a game is going to come out.
It’s not big news when a game gets delayed (See Doom3). It IS news however, when a game actually makes their first target date.
Is Gamer’s Hell trustworthy?
Apparently not?
More On The Half-Life 2 Delay
By: MaJ-ReD
View/Post Comments (10)
I just visited HL2Central.net and read their most recent news post. I figured it would make a good post for all those that don’t visit any other news sites. The post was about a fake email announcement sent out to news sites. After reading the post on HL2Central.net I checked our news submittion email here, and of course, the same email they speak of was in our inbox. So, here it is:
My apoligies to those affected by the e-mail that made it’s way around
news sites in past hours. Unfortunately it was nothing more than a cruel
joke. Doug Lombardi sent no such e-mail.
I can assure you there is no such Half-Life 2 delay, and that details
regarding the release will be made public in coming days. Expect the
tech-demo and SDK to be released on or prior to the 30th.
Thanks for your patience and understanding,
Gabe Newell
This email was supposedly sent out from [email protected], however, as HL2Central.net discovered, it did not actually originate from Valve at all. HL2Central.net and City-17.net can confirm that the email from Doug Lombardi, stating Half-Life 2 is delayed, is genuine.
Update: To avoid confusion, the only fake email is the one above, supposedly from Gabe stating that Half-Life 2 isn’t delayed. That was fake and was traced to Brisbane, Australia. The Delay email from Doug Lombardi is not fake. We traced this directly to Valve.
Update: This is for those who still don’t understand why this email was posted, and where it came from. At the time of posting, HL2Central.net had a post on their webpage about the email that is in my post here. Because they were the first webpage to have any information about this email, I gave them credit for it. Now, because there were only 3 sites targeted by this fake email, they found no point in keeping the post on the site, so they removed it. Now, that makes my post seem to be in the wrong. However, it is not. If you still don’t understand, well then I can do nothing more for you.
This is like a bad Monty Python sketch :P
I’d have thought the fake e-mail not containing any spelling errors would have been a dead give-away.
So what the hell is going on? Is the game delayed or not?
–Dave
Yes.
check the header of that email, I have seen the header myself, and the ip address is from Aussie… the Gabe Newell email is a spoof