A Half-Life away

One of the most eagerly anticipated PC games of recent years, Half-Life 2, was finally released on 16 November.

Developer Valve Software spent five years creating the sequel to the game that took the first-person shooter market by storm in 1998.

The past 18 months have seen Valve come under increased pressure from publisher Vivendi Universal Games and gamers alike to release Half-Life 2. Unfortunately, as the original release date approached last year, someone stole parts of the source code of the title and posted it on the Internet.

The fact that the FBI got involved in the investigation reflected the seriousness of the theft. Of course, this led to several delays in releasing the title that spanned the better part of the year. Suffice it to say when Valve announced that it would make the game available in November, interest rose to fever pitch.

To prevent the game from leaking on the Internet, Valve announced that gamers would have to activate Half-Life 2 online before being able to play it. The company also made the game available for download on its Steam content delivery network several weeks before its official launch.

The company is merely punishing those who legally bought the game.

Iwan Pienaar, editorial production manager, ITWeb

This, the theory went, would allow broadband Internet users to download the full version of the game and simply activate and decrypt it come 16 November. It would still be sold through the traditional retail channel, but this showed gamers, retailers and publishers that Valve was considering releasing games through alternative channels in future.

Activating a product through the Internet is nothing new. Microsoft did it with several of its products, including Windows XP. Unfortunately, the way in which Valve structured the activation would turn it into a very unpopular developer.

After installing the game, users have to go online to update the packaged Steam software. On dial-up (which I use) this took about an hour. Following this, you need to create an account on the Steam server. On average, this would take about 10 minutes.

The next step would be to register the CD-key of your Half-Life 2 copy on the Steam servers. This should be fast, right? Wrong. Using a dial-up connection it took me close on two hours to get my game registered. Surely this had to be the final step. After spending three hours online, I was getting slightly annoyed, to say the least.

However, it turns out that gamers who bought the title from retail stores still have to decrypt their files in the same way as those who had downloaded the game weeks before. This meant another two hours spent online decrypting files.

At five hours, this is by far the longest time I`ve spent on getting a game to work. And since this is the procedure you will have to go through (bar creating an account) every time you want to install Half-Life 2, it will also be the game that stays on my hard drive the longest.

Some argue that Valve is merely protecting its best interests by making it as difficult as possible to illegally distribute the game.

Unfortunately, the company is merely punishing those who legally bought the game. Theoretically speaking, there is nothing stopping a person from buying the game and simply installing it on several different machines. These machines will not be able to log in to the Steam servers simultaneously, but there should not be any reason why the game cannot be played offline on these machines.

Granted, this is the first time activating a game like this has been done and there are sure to be hiccoughs. But when broadband users start complaining about how long it takes them to get their game working, Valve should sit up and take notice. Instead, it is stubbornly refusing to admit that perhaps it did not take into account the popularity of the game and the effect millions of people trying to activate their game on the same day might have on its servers.

But is the game any good? Sadly, it is. Let us hope that despite all the rave reviews Half-Life 2 is getting, gamers remember the pain they had to go through to get it working in the first place.

Just imagine doing this for every game we buy...