Well, that sucks, but at least they seem to be fairly on the ball with providing a solution. But damn, they should have given people some warning and done this shit *before* the service closed.
Yeah, I agree -- they should've let people know they were going under sometime before the server went down. I bet many gamers were like, "WTF?!?!?!?"
And Triton should have probably had, if possible, the patch out before their server was gonna go kaput.
What idol said. I would never buy a game that required net authorization to work. Not fucking ever. Except for HL2, which was a huge mistake.
But I'm sure not many people plan to probably play HL2: Single Player again, regardless of how great it is; hehe.
What I mean is the HL games don't really have much replay value, you know, hehe.
I don't replay many games I finish -- I still trying to keep up w/ old and new games, myself.
Joking aside, I don't like the whole "Net Authorization" Requirement. It's stupid. I can understand it for a MP based game w/ a certain server to play over (like say an MMO like Guild Wars), but not SP components.
This is where Steam-like digital distribution and more importantly, authorization is dangerous. If they go under, your games might be toast.
Yes! This is what I don't like about digital distribution. There really does need to be some other sort of copyright protection method instead of this "Steam" style of authorization for buying online games.
I always found it silly that I have to "authorize" my copy of a Steam game that I bought at the store on DVD for myself!
Now, just being able to buy online and download is fine if it doesnt have to "phone home" to work.
Exactly.
I myself believe that once a game is no longer being supported by the designers w/ patches, the company should just remove the CR protection; it's not like they'll make much more $$ off it, since a lot of the $$ will probably already be made. And what would be even better, after removing the CR protection, make the game open source. Let the modders keep it alive, for centuries to come....
I mean, look at the original classic Doom. Doom is a classic example. A great game, that got a great mod community, eventually Id made it open source when they ended support on it, and the community still does stuff to it, and the retail game is still sold in publication being sold at stores. Activision still has in jewel cases at stores Doom for the PC -- and dirt cheap, too. It still SELLS, some 10 years later, yet I have trouble finding a copy of the masterpiece System Shock 2 these days. Maybe if more companies that made great games followed this model, their game some 10 or so more year laters will still be treated like Doom is treated.
I really hope that sometime once Valve is done, they remove Steam from their games. It'd be a shame to see Valve go under -- and well, their great Half-Life games no longer being played by anyone b/c they didn't remove their silly Steam protection.