OK Valve/Vivendi, what's the deal?

BlumenKohl

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Did all the English speaking Vivendi personnel die? Is the language barrier preventing you from communicating with each other? Do you not want to pay an extra long distance fee to call up each other? A fax? Or do you even lack the energy to send an e-mail back and forth?

No wait, have you even communicated with each other in the past two months?

And before I go any further, all you little fanboys who flame at the first sign of "Valve is bad" or "Something about Valve is bad", this is going there, so don't read any further, if you do, show some civility.

This is the second time this has happend in the last few months. Vivendi says something, Valve looks at us blankly, and then the wait up right up until the last moment and say "oh, we just realized it's delayed. Sorry."

The two companies are so unprofessional it isn't even funny. (Maybe that's why Vivendi is selling assets and converging on bankruptcy, losing 70 million dollars just this year) It appears they lack any communication with each other, and that is a major part of all the latest crap.

The latest crap? Source code and beta leak.

Let's retrace our steps and see if we can figure out what happend. Vivendi announces a delay, and Valve shifts gears from "9/30" to "We don't know." "First we heard of it." "No Comment." Then near the end of August in some interviews they say "9/30" again, leaving fans confused and that confusion caused a lot of the fans to get pissed off. The two companies [Vivendi and Valve] are confusing themselves, the fans, and they make a mess for themselves.

Ah but it doesn't end there, Valve goes on a anti-nVidia spree, pissing off nVidia fans, and trashing the hardware at every turn. Yes it the FX line is bad, but my god I don't think Valve even bothered doing any real optimizing for nVidia cards.

Yes, John Carmack and the Stalker guys say that such and such hardware perform a little below the other under our games, but they also point out advantages the cards have over each other.

Mr. Newell gives us a one sided, nVidia is crap anyway you cut it, because I didn't work with nVidia to try and optimize it. (Stalker also uses DX9 shaders that HL2 uses, and nVidia works very well with that game, why can't it work with HL2? Oh yes, Valve doesn't want to work with nVidia.)

It doesn't end there either. They WAIT right up until the last week before release, and say "Oh sorry, it's delayed."

OK, when you screw over your fan base, who've supported you like that, by withholding information, and then not even attempting to have any worth while communication with Vivendi, causing all the confusion....there's gonna be people who'll be pissed off, and people who will go to such lengths such as hacking a company.

I'm not saying Valve deserved to get hacked (IMO, no one "deserves" anything in this world...)and have this whole mess come up, but the way they acted made the whole thing a lot more probable.

The die was cast, probability won and Valve lost.

Now we're back to square one, Vivendi says the game is delayed, and Valve says "We don't know. We're assessing the damage..."

Which brings us back to, where the hell did Vivendi get "April" from, was it from Valve? Is Valve hiding info...again?

The two companies can't communicate with each other, much less communicate with the fans.

In conclusion, the award for worst partnership, and communication between two corporations goes to Valve Software and Vivendi Universal.

Why is it Activision, EA, Atari, THQ, etc. consult with their developers on game release dates before making official comments regarding them, while Vivendi and Valve go off and do something completely different from each other?
 
Good point. I myself thought it was ludacrious to wait till 6 days before release to tell all your fans who are so anxious for 9/30....."Err err err..hl2 is delayed kthxbye....."

9/23 Valve: The game is still on for 9/30
9/24 Valve: The game is delayed till the holidays ( umm WHAT HOLIDAY???!!!)

Then they get hacked and gabe comes on here saying

"Please community help us track these bad haxx0rs down!"

Not a good way to treat your loyal fans.
 
now that the beta is out, i can't forsee them waiting till april of 2004 to release. if they do, by the time that date comes around, the mod community will have already made their own version of hl2, a version thats free to play online as well. i dont know if people realize that now that there is all this content + the source. the possibilities are endless for what modders can do
 
Finally, a diamond of a post amongst the boulders of coal. That is something you should really send to Gabe, maybe he'll read it and wake up to himself.
 
Gabe will respond : "we are assessing the damage, because.... lol !Valve rocks and... errr.. you know."
 
Nice analysis of all that mess!!

This is exactly what i think about it.


In that forum you could read Gabe saying NO when someone ask if the game was delayed because of the leak, now Vivendi says it's the reason.

Gabe says that only the third of the code was stolen and everyone that has seen it can say it is complete and working!

It seems that everybody mix up everything there and tell us half-lies. I have my own company and if i had handeled my customers as Valve i would be a tramp since a long time!!

Valve is great when it's about making a wonderfull game, but when it's about comunication they better shut up.
 
Blumen, i am a die hard Valve fan, and i 100% agree with this, send it to Gabe, send it to EVERYONE you can

If none of Valve reads it, well then................i must say they really need to get off their high horse :(
 
Originally posted by machima
Finally, a diamond of a post amongst the boulders of coal. That is something you should really send to Gabe, maybe he'll read it and wake up to himself.

I liked the way you put that.:cheers:

oh, and yeah I agree.
 
Well put. What I don't get is that at E3 they said the game was basically done. What the hell did they do for the 6 months after that?
 
While you do make some good points, you also do a lot of speculation and ignore facts.

First off, Valve did 3 times as much work for Nvidia cards as ATI hardware. We've seen similar results in Tomb Raider and Halo. STALKER runs the way it does because it was built on the Nvidia path.

And you gotta realize that all this shit about Valve lying to you and messing around with fans' heads, is speculation. You get angry, and assume they lied to you. We don't know that Valve already planned to delay the game a month before the announcement.

Vivendi and Valve have different agendas. Vivendi has their own reasons for stating HL2 will be delayed.
 
i dont really think the nvidia card thing is valves part cause its an error with their current drivers but the rest sounds preaty good
 
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