Half Life 2 is Free on Steam
(store.steampowered.com)
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Funny story about Half Life 2. When it first came out my friend drove to the store to buy it and I started downloading the pirate copy on Kazaa at the same time. Because of the technical issues when steam was first released I was playing the game before he was.
Valve knew what they were doing. They wanted to live off of rent, not make games. Half-Life 2 was the killer app to bring people into the Steam ecosystem.
Well Steam lives rent free in our brains as the first choice for PC gaming. So they won.
It's actually been losing that status for me. As I grow older I look to the future and to the inevitability of the platform being enshittified once Gaben kicks the bucket. Now I buy games on GoG because I value an actual installation executable more highly than the conveniences Steam offers.
They recently kicked off some sort of game preservation initiative, which might just be some clever marketing but I'll be glad if it continues gaining traction and becomes an industry standard practice: https://www.gog.com/en/gog-preservation-program
Can you imagine? Full Software Lifecycle support for decades old games in perpetuity? It sounds like a dream.
Not that you’re wrong—and of course having the executable is what’s relevant when it comes to purchases you’re making now—but I’m also worried about GoG’s future long term. They are owned by CDPR, and we all know how that company is going….