Unseemly row mars Half Life 2 "launch"

AS SOAP OPERAS GO, the Valve/Vivendi relationship is a great one. Let's do a little recap. Vivendi and Valve are in the midst of a little courtroom tiff about releasing the game Half-Life 2. Vivendi has to make boxes for software, Valve doesn't. Advantage Valve, so enter the lawyers, lawsuits and hushed up ugliness. The short story is that Valve agreed not to turn on Half-Life 2 until Vivendi put it on sale in a physical way.

Fine and dandy, no one puts it on sale until the other one says OK, and uneasy peace ensues. Then I got a phone call saying that both Best Buy and Target had the boxed versions on sale three days early. Funnier still, employees at both locations said that they were given the official OK by management, it was on sale now. Someone is playing games, and since it comes from several stores at once, it is probably coming from the top.

So, what happens to all those people who got their copy early? Well, disappointment, you see, you can buy it early, install it early, and even do fetishistic things with the packaging materials, but you can't play it. To play it, you need to authenticate off Valve's servers, as Wil pointed out in his earlier column. Valve is sticking to the agreement they got stuck with. Ain't payback a bitch.

Everyone who got the game got effectively what Valve is selling, Half-Life 2 on Tuesday. I wonder if the people at Vivendi knew what they were doing? I wonder if they knew if Valve held the keys? One thing for sure, Valve didn't have a clue, they got blindsided also. The following press release hit my inbox at 6:51pm on a Saturday night, sure it was prepared in advance. PR so loves working weekends. µ

Half-Life 2 For Sale?

If you have purchased a copy of Half-Life 2, we are sorry you are still waiting to play. This is not Valve's choice. Vivendi is insisting that the game has not yet been released, and has threatened that Valve would be in violation of its contract if we activate the Half-Life 2 Steam authentication servers at this time.

Thanks for your patience and we will update you when we have more news to share.

I would so love to be in on the phone calls between Valve and Vivendi right now. Either way, no matter how this ends up, and who said what to whom, there are two things you can be certain of. First, there are going to be a lot of rich lawyers in a short while, and secondly, there will be a lot of interesting news stories coming out of this. We are drooling at the prospect already. µ