Pull numbers out of your a.s much?

Right.  People who live in big cities and have all sorts of broadband
options don't realize that 80% of the internet users in the US still
have dial-up connections, and for many of them, there will most likely
never be a faster alternative.  I work at a business that is just 3
miles outside of a city, and the fastest dial-up connection we can get
there is 28K.  It took me hours just to download a little spyware
program there.

DSL only works within about 3 miles of the base station.  If you live 15
miles out in the country, that won't work, and cable companies don't
want to string 15 miles of cable to service one or two homes.  It's just
not cost effective for them.

Broadband penetration is going to have to improve dramatically in the
next 2 or 3 years for game distribution to go to online delivery for
the majority. Also major players like EA, VU, and Ubi are going to have
to switch to online content delivery mechanisms (or at least offer it).
I can see 5 years from now nearly any game you would care to buy will
be available online (that's almost the case now, actually) but I don't
see retail dying off for PC gaming in 5 years. Maybe 10. And console
gaming will take even longer to die in retail. Way longer.

Not that I have a crystal ball or anything. :)

Knight37

I would say easily within 5 years.

"SpammersDie" <xx@xx.xx> once tried to test me with:

Why, do you have a crystal ball? No you don't. So yes, YOU HAVE NO IDEA.
Valve doesn't have to make any announcements. Why the f.ck should they?
They may make some agreement with whoever buys them in the end that
precludes them from releasing a patch, so then they'd have to break their
decision anyway. Best to not say nothing, since IT ISN'T RELEVANT NOW.
There's ZERO business reason to make such an announcement NOW, when it's
only relative if and when they get in financial trouble and Steam becomes
impossible to maintain.

That may be true. But companies have released patches in the past for older
titles that remove the copy protection, after the highest volume of sales
have already been made. Look at the 1.66 patch to NWN for an example of
that. It removes the CD-check. I seem to recall one or more of the Unreal
Tournament games did this as well.

Vote how you want, and think what you want, it doesn't change the fact that
you don't know the future.

That's fine. I'll be playing my Steam games and you can play, well whatever  
I guess. The future of gaming is online content delivery. It won't happen
this year, it won't happen in five years maybe, but it's slowly but surely
happening. So as I said. Get used to it.

And as I've already said on this very thread, *if* they release such a patch
or even annouce officially when the Steam leash will come off the SP
version, I'll reconsider the way I look at them but I'm not going to agree
that I have "no idea" whether HL2 has long term accessibility or not.
There's no business reason for a company that's about to shut its doors to
spend time releasing such a patch. I think the chances are excellent that it
will not - enough for me to talk about it that way without adding a
probabilistic disclaimer to every sentence, and for sure, enough to affect
how I vote TODAY with my dollars.

And as for other companies following suit, they won't get my dollars either.
There are plenty of entertainment options other than playing PC games.

That hasn't happened yet so stop talking about it like it has. You have
no idea if HL2 has long term accessibility or not. It's accessible
RIGHT NOW and that's all you can actually say. If and when Valve goes
out of business, only THEN can you say whether or not HL2 will have
long-term accessibility. For all we know Valve will release a patch to
HL2 before they close their doors making it playable without requiring
Steam at all. Or not. We DO NOT KNOW YET.

If you want to bitch about having to go online to do validation then
bitch about that, but don't bitch about not being able to play a game
in 2010 or whenever, since that hasn't occured yet. BTW, Valve isn't
the only one doing online validation for offline content. Bioware is
also doing it with their premium modules for NWN. I'm sure in the
future this will become more and more common, so get used to it.
Personally I prefer this type of "intrusion" to other forms of copy
protection like Star Force.

Knight37

Um, no they didn't.

The day LGS died, my installations of SS1 and Thief booted up for me just
fine. They still do.

No hyperspace transmission went out from LGS's HQ to kill all their
previously installed games.

Because you upgraded the underlying OS.

As riku has already pointed out, you are comparing apples and oranges.

No game is guaranteed to work on future OS's that didn't even exist when the
game was developed.

But most games don't have an intentional built-in remote-destruct mechanism
designed into the way Steam games do.

Thus, once again, I will punish Valve for that and not punish LGS and other
long-dead DOS game makers. Those guys did the best they could reasonably do
given the state of DOS and the lack of a decent abstraction layer for
hardware at the time. Valve, on the other hand, purposefully put a hurdle in
for the game's long term accesssibility.

And I'll take control and security over convenience.

actually, they did. hell, i remember trying to get ss1 going several
years ago and having problems with it. i'm sure there's a solid way now
but no game is guaranteed to continue working out of the box once the
developer and support vanishes. there are hundreds more old games that no
longer work because there's no one around to "officially" support them.
don't hear you cryin' about those. hey, games have to last forever, right?

so, having to keep old operating systems, old hardware, and use
emulation software is no big deal.. but using a 100k crack to make sure
half-life 2 keeps working is completely unreasonable.

i'll take the ~100k file over keeping dusty old hardware around, kthx.
it seems the rabid anti-steam folk aren't much for convenience. taking
up space, using extra electricity, just to play some old games.
installing extra applications, dual-booting. how silly.

software running on your pc is always under your control unless you
stubbornly let it control you just so you can sit on your soapbox and
have a big whinefest. my copy of half-life 2 is going to work "forever,"
as long as any other game would, regardless of valve.

Um... Looking Glass went down years ago and guess what, SS1, Thief, etc.
didn't suddenly stop working.

Yes, it takes an effort to get SS1 *if you change the underlying OS* - so
what, when LG went down, my Win98 CD's didn't just vanish in a poof of
orange smoke - I can always dual boot or VPC or just keep my older hardware
around as an offline DOS/Win9x game console, which is in fact exactly what I
do - I'm not dependent on third party hacks of questionable legality and
origin.

I have no choice to do that with HL2 because it's *designed* to become
nonfunctional whenever Valve decides to - the game's lifetime is under their
control, not mine. Since that's an intentional design decision by Valve (as
opposed to the other games who did nothing intentional to become hard to run
a decade later under an OS with an entirely different kernel and device
driver architecture), I *will* penalize Valve and not those other companies.

that's the point, innit. when those other companies went under, and
their ancient games no longer worked out of the box, the gamers had to
find ways to get them going again. there's absolutely no reason
whatsoever the same wouldn't happen in the unlikely event that valve
went under leaving their steam catalogue of games unplayable. it's the
exact same thing.

if you're not going to penalize companies for disappearing and no longer
supporting their games so that they work currently, i don't see how you
can criticize steam based on some prediction that if valve ever went
under you would no longer be able to play their games. you may have
other issues with steam, and that's fine, but we're talking about
something specific here and it's something a lot of people bring up and
it's stupid. dopey john lewis will sit there and boast about his
collection of old hardware he keeps around just to play games that no
longer work under a modern OS and then gripe about the possibilities of
half-life 2 no longer functioning in the future. use your brain. offline
play is already guaranteed based on software that came out before hl2
was even on the shelves.

there are legitimate flaws with the steam system. leave out the
imaginary ones.

Which still means that once you get it to run, it won't stop working the
next day because some computer out there that you have no control over is
down or just decides it doesn't want to let you play anymore.

I'm not just whining about Steam, I'm hitting the companies that use it in
the pocketbook. You use Steam, you're fired. End of story.

even games that require third party applications, emulation, and in many
cases, community designed patches to run?

whine about steam, and forget all those hundreds of old games that
simply wont run without special effort and software. i'm sure you'd have
no trouble throwing them on a list.

I personally don't think SS2 deserves to be on this list but at least it
qualifies to be in consideration given that I can install it and play it now
whether or not Irrational is still in business and running a validation
server.

Since HL2's lifetime is by design constrained to the business lifetime of
Valve and their willingness to validate the game online, it's automatically
disqualified for any "All time greatest game" list I'd consider
authoritative (it's also automatically disqualified from any game purchase
list I'll put together.) In order to pass the "all time" test, you have to
be installable and playable for "all time"!

If Valve should someday deign to put out a downloadable, archivable,
offline-installable patch that frees HL2 from this umbilical, then we can
talk.

just so noone misunderstands me, I dont think Doom 3 will be on such a
list, but Half-Life 2 will absolutely be on the list.

Maybe Doom 3, but not Half-Life 2

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6130956/index.html

In a couple of years time NOBODY even remembers the shitpiles like Half
Life 2 or Doom 3.