Do other retail purchaser feel like second class citizens?

[Maxi]

Jeebus! You have to have your DVD in the drive while playing the game! Wow Valve sucks for implementing such a thing! Wait... hasn't almost EVERY game EVER had that "feature"? Yeah.. I guess they have...

Also I think Valve did this to give the people who bought via Steam a "carrot" so to say, for "giving" Valve more money.

 

[Methias]

if you look at it on the other hand (which you may not want to ), then you only gave them $7, while we gave them $30.
And if steam does go down you can still play it?

This is a bullshit argument. To the consumer, the point-of-view that any rational, non-money-grubbing company would consider these days, the amount of money forked over is the same. We are paying the same amount and getting less. So yeah, great! If you bought through Steam to do your part and get more of your cash over to Valve, that's great! I'm proud of you (actually, no...no I don't give a shit)! But most if not effectively all of the people who are going to buy this game aren't going to know the difference and are going to be sitting there wondering why they got ripped off.

Edit: And to all of you wondering why I don't return the game and buy through Steam? Believe me, I've tried. A very convoluted series of events has conspired to keep me from doing this. So I'm pretty much ****ed.

 

[Methias]

Jeebus! You have to have your DVD in the drive while playing the game! Wow Valve sucks for implementing such a thing! Wait... hasn't almost EVERY game EVER had that "feature"? Yeah.. I guess they have...

Yeah, game companies have been doing this for a while and also have seen their efforts promptly made void by crackers around the globe. Valve actually had a good plan to combat this. It was called Steam, and now that it has been put fully into motion (assigning one CD key to each Steam account, and only allowing one person to play multiplayer games on that account at a time) there is absolutely no need for this archaic and, quite frankly, useless technique to continue being used.

Also I think Valve did this to give the people who bought via Steam a "carrot" so to say, for "giving" Valve more money.

You don't see this as being a rather shady practice on the part of Valve? Especially in light of pending litigation from Vivendi?

 

[Dalamari]

I got retail

Don't feel any less for it....if you are playing a game don't you keep the disc in the drive anyways?

 

[Clavius]

Its unheared that retail owners are srewed so bad. Clearly, Valve's first concern was to furfill their contract with Vivendi, instead of properly delivering their masterpiece.
A disk with their steam pre-load files is not a retail copy. It is a steam copy for people who did not want to use their creditcard.

Besides irritating Vivendi and whoring steam, I see no reason why retail buyers should not be able to upgrade, or play the game without their cd/dvd.

Its unbelievably dumb of Valve not to release a standalone game, since this will undoubtly encourage people to just download the warezed hl2 and play the game without all the hassle.
A friend of mine is on a campus network, and he can not use steam. This makes it impossible to active hl2 from his computer and to play css, wich he wasnt going to anyway.
Sure, he can rip out his harddrive to activate the game at my place, sure he can try and convince the admin to unlock the ports for the Nth time, etc etc etc. Instead he takes the userfriendly way and just leech the damn thing off a newsgroup.

 

[ChronosWing]

http://www.gameburnworld.com/gp/gamefixes/halflife2.htm
last one on the page, bypasses the cd-check, replaces no files, simple as extracting the files to your steam folder and running the exe. Its totally harmless, the source code is available on his website to prove it(look in readme for url). I can attest that this works, and am super happy my DVD can sit in its case in the shiny hl2 box never to be touched or used again, since next time I format I'll just be lazy and download the files off steam.

 

[sup2069]

Im glad that I found this thread before buying through ebay.


Looks like ill be buying through steam now