Valve finally distributes Half Life 2 to Steam users
August 27th, 2004
Starting today you can download the Half Life 2 Client using Valve’s “Steam” software distribution framework. Now .. you can’t play Half Life 2 yet - the downloaded code is encrypted. However, as soon as Valve ships HL2 to stores ( or sometime shortly thereafter ) Steam will allow you to purchase HL2 and they’ll instantly send you a code to unlock the binary.
The benefit of this, of course, is that you’ll have the game preloaded onto your computer ahead of time and you’ll be able to start playing the game immediately. Since this initial file seed is only 600 megs, I’m sure Valve will have a software patch at release - but that’s the “beauty” of Steam. The client downloads missing game-data to your PC while you play.
Steam has been in development for a long while. The last I heard someone speak of their experiences with it was 6 months ago, and they reported that it was pretty buggy. since then Valve has used a few new versions of Counterstrike to test the Steam “push” distribution, and my hopes are that most bugs have been ironed out.
Straightaway my confidence isn’t high. This morning I attempted to download the Steam client and immediately the installer gave a checksum error. Grr. I’ll try again later today.
My experiences with steam have all been pretty good. I haven’t used it to get any *new* games, but I did download the original Half-Life, CounterStrike etc, simply by entering in my CD code from the original HL CD. 10 minutes later I was playing the game. I’ll have to give it a shot just as soon as I reboot into windows.
Comment by Peter Kovacs — August 27, 2004 @ 8:38 am
Steam’s working great for me too. I have the free HL I got as a bundle when I bought my 9800 Pro a while back. It’s downloading the HL2 Pre-Load as right now and up to 10.6%. Er, 10.7%. Er, 10.8%. Ok, you get the point.
Comment by joshua — August 27, 2004 @ 9:03 am
Cool. I’m glad it works.
Does anyone have a steaminstaller.exe they could give me, ’cause the official one is still hosed. Tried it at home using Firebird, IE, and now at work using FireFox.. no dice. It doesn’t seem to be a browser issue.
Comment by Della Bitta — August 27, 2004 @ 9:48 am