EA to distribute Valve games

<div class="quote"><div class="quotetitle">? quote:Internode Games Network

</div><div class="quotetext">Sydney, NSW ? July 19, 2005 ? Electronic Arts, the world?s leading
interactive entertainment company and Valve?, the award-winning studio
behind the blockbuster franchises Half-Life? and Counter-Strike?, today
announced that the two companies have entered a multi-year agreement to
deliver a collection of Valve games to players worldwide. The first two
games to be released under this agreement are Half-Life 2: Game of the
Year and Counter-Strike: Source? for PC, both launching this spring. In
addition, Half-Life 2 for the Xbox? video game system from Microsoft,
currently in development at Valve and targeted for release in October,
will be published and distributed worldwide by EA.

?At EA Partners, our mandate is to seek out the world?s top studios and
game franchises, build partnerships, empower the development teams and
help get these great games to more people in more countries than ever
before. We consider Half-Life and Counter-Strike to be two of the best
game franchises of all time,? said Tom Frisina, Vice President and
General Manager, EA Partners. ?We could not be more excited to have the
opportunity to help deliver these outstanding games to players around
the globe.?

?EA is the worldwide leader in bringing best of breed games, for all
platforms, to market,? said Gabe Newell, Valve?s founder and president.
?Valve games have sold over 18 million units at retail since Half-Life
shipped in November 1998. By combining EA?s unparalleled operation
structure and distribution channel with Valve?s award-winning
development teams and games community, we?ve established an awesome
combination for delivering great products to console and PC gamers
around the world.?

Half-Life 2: Game of the Year is a special edition release of the
best-selling and critically acclaimed title that includes Half-Life 2,
Counter-Strike: Source, plus Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, and Half-Life:
Source.

Counter-Strike: Source takes the world?s number one online action game
to new heights atop the Source engine with brilliant graphics, enhanced
versions of the classic CS maps, all-new CS maps, offline skirmish play
with AI bots, and more. It also includes Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and
Day of Defeat?: Source.

Half Life 2 for the Xbox system defines a new benchmark in console
gaming with startling realism and responsiveness. Powered by Source
technology, Half-Life 2 for Xbox features the most sophisticated
in-game characters ever witnessed, advanced AI, stunning graphics and
physical gameplay.

For more information about EA please visit http://www.ea.com and for information about Valve, please visit: http://www.valvesoftware.com

</div></div>

Good thing or bad thing? Thoughts?

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SourDough2.0 - With Strawberry Jam

Don't care actually. They didn't even become publishers as some people
thought, but distributors, so that Valve will still decide all the
release dates...

I won't complain until games do get to shells of the markets in Estonia.

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HL2 tutorials 'n' stuff: http://madedog.pri.ee
217.159.236.34:27050 - CSS Server - Clean | koffer.ee

Given EA's reputation, I'd rather they have as little to do with valve as possible. It seems like Gabe's keeping as separate from them as possible, having EA as a distributor gives them the advantage of getting their games to a much wider audience than Vivendi could, and prevents EA from f**king up a good thing by having too much involvement with the franchise. As far as I can see (someone like KFS would have a much better idea of whats going on) it looks like this will mean more sales and profit for Valve, and more chance of HL3.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

Let's hope EA doesn't release patches that make the game don't work
*cough*Battlefield 2*cough* and then release a HOTFIX that doesn't do
jack either *cough*battlefield 2*cough*

I know EA have a pretty dodgy reputation but i dont really see why,
anyone care to elaborate? Suppose its like the whole Microsoft hating
thing?

EA are getting in on this because of Steam imo. Content delivery like
Steam is ultimately the future for gaming, and EA are bound to be
interested in that.

EA rule the world :biggrin:

And French toast, I think your getting greatly confused... EA don't make anything- they merely package and sell it, blame the makers of the game for the crap patches.

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-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

EA generally don't have the most wonderful of standards compared to
many other publishers (eg. Ubisoft), yet due to their huge funds they
can market the s**t out of their games, get exclusive stalls in shops
and so on, and end up selling them to s**t loads of people. Its not
uncommon for EA to have 6 or so of the games in the top 10 at any given
time. They also have a reputation for buying up things (eg. their
recent attempted takeover of Ubisoft), exclusivity deals (eg. the
recent one with the NFL, thereby stopping competing companies making
"official" american football games), forcing their unskippable logo on
at the start of games (normally making the actual developer of the game
seem second fiddle to them), and forcing horrendous working standards
on some of their internal teams (unpaid overtime galore!).

That said, I'm sure some of it is down to "blind hate" a la Microsoft.

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

i agree with reno about EA (no doubt better sells for valve), but HL2 for the xbox?
NO
it should not be converted over to the cosole, its a pc game meant for pc only i mean look at doom 3. it was a pretty s**tty game on the pc but on the xbox it was even worse. sure some games should be distributed around all platforms but i think hl2 should stay a pc game.

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Bullet Control: $5000 for a bullet.
"I would blow your f**king head off! ...if I could afford it. I'm gonna get another job, start saving some money... then you a dead man!"

EA rule the world :biggrin:
And French toast, I think your getting greatly confused... EA don't
make anything- they merely package and sell it, blame the makers of the
game for the crap patches.

I just want to blame someone for not testing a patch and f**king up the game, which I've had to reinstall 3 times now.

Why does it matter rival? You've still got the PC version. Nobody is
going to force the xbox version onto you. I think its great that its
going to be available for people without a PC - its a great game, and
if more people can experience it thanks to the xbox, then why not? I
doubt it will even be all that watered down - source was always
designed to be a very scaleable engine - I'm sure it will look markedly
better on the xbox than it will on dx7 limited PC hardware. Perhaps
there will be less detailed models and textures, but the overall
"oomph" of the game, with good physics and grand environments, will
probably make a pretty successful conversion.

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

i understand what you mean reno and if they keep it exactly the same in terms of story and levels then its fine. i know i probably wont play i just dont like seeing conversions unless they're decent!

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Bullet Control: $5000 for a bullet.
"I would blow your f**king head off! ...if I could afford it. I'm gonna get another job, start saving some money... then you a dead man!"

They won't change anything - or at least nothing significant. If
anything you might see additions (eg. the "lost coast" chapter, or the
something like the "decay" coop mode that came with HL for the ps2),
but I doubt anything critical will be missing. It doesn't come with
CS:S or, I imagine, HL2:DM however, thereby making it effectively more
money, for less product :sad:

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

EA are evil says this picture:



Nuff said!

I wonder if the xbox version will be able to load custom maps?

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

The first Xbox version of CS sucked big time. I own it. It came out
around... 3 months before HL2 i believe, they should have waited till
they could get source on Xbox. It might have out sold Halo 2 if they
did.

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http://img362.imageshack.us/img362/8521/windows981dk.jpg

Nickelplate is my dad

Outsell Halo 2? Thats bulls**t and you know it :razz: CS's popularity on
the PC isn't really worth anything for the console market, at least not
this late in the lifespan of current ones. I doubt any IP that
translates from PC to console could outsell something like Halo 2, and
I'd be amazed if HL2 makes any sort of hugely significant sales that
reach, say, the system's all time top 10.

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

Outsell Halo 2? Thats bulls**t and you know it :razz: CS's popularity on
the PC isn't really worth anything for the console market, at least not
this late in the lifespan of current ones. I doubt any IP that
translates from PC to console could outsell something like Halo 2, and
I'd be amazed if HL2 makes any sort of hugely significant sales that
reach, say, the system's all time top 10.

Hmm, i guess we wil just have to wait and see :smile:

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http://img362.imageshack.us/img362/8521/windows981dk.jpg

Nickelplate is my dad

Hehe, very true :smile:

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

The only beef I have with EA is the rape of artistic and unique games.

They are almost a invterted valve, where valve puts the game above all
else. EA has to keep the game above only the bottom line.
They may have 6:10 top games, but they are the MTV of the game
industry. Same thing over and over again, then every once in a
while they get their hands on true unique game that some how keeps its
creative freedom and those are the true blue great games, and what push
EA further into the spot light (which in turn makes people hate them
for nothing more that being bigger than everything)

i mean look at doom 3. it was a pretty s**tty game on the pc but on the xbox it was even worse.

Says one person. :razz: D3 on the Xbox has sold phenomenally well and a lot of review sites consider it the 'better' version thanks to the addition of online coop and probably the fact that the game had to be trimmed down a bit (a process I was maybe a couple weeks shy of helping with! :o ). It became more focused and also is light-years beyond most FPS titles on the consoles, ports or not.

Things like D3 and HL2 on the Xbox are huge. It's putting the core FPS franchises into a sector of the industry starving for FPSes in the wake of Halo and other efforts that have fallen short of its smash success. HL2 probably won't outsell Halo/Halo 2, but it'll still be huge and could rank up there. Halo itself still only sold something like 5 million copies, with initial sales of Halo 2 at 5 million as well and the remaining 1 million of the shortly-post-halo2 numbers of 11 million from the PC version (or something similar). We know HL2 has sold at least 1.7 million copies; my guess would be nearing the 3-4 million mark now on PC alone. Put that on the Xbox and I could see at least another 2-4 million, especially with the sort of marketing oomph EA could put behind it compared to, say, Vivendi (or Valve themselves).

As for the deal as a whole, Valve is working with EA Partners (a branch of EA) that just puts third-party games on shelves. Valve is probably in a position much like Will Wright right now. Why is Spore being made? It goes against everything that any major publisher would even consider. But it's Will Wright, who has made EA ridiculous sums of money in his previous products. They cannot afford to lose him, even though I bet execs are peeing their pants wondering if that game will take off. Given the third-party interaction and the market power that Valve has (and the ability to go anywhere), EA can't dick 'em around.

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www.button-masher.net

HAhahahahha, which fewl thinks CS or HL2 will outsell Halo2!? They truely don't own an xbox, and are king of fools among fools!

And Wil50n it probably can load custom maps. I've downloaded extra maps for Halo 2 for my Xbox, I'm sure it will probably use a similar map editor for HL2 Xbox (if not the same one), and probably the same format systems knowing valve, lazy buggers.

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-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

Myrk- said:
I'm sure it will probably use a similar map editor for HL2 Xbox (if not the same one), and probably the same format systems knowing valve, lazy buggers.

The file formats and such would most definately be identical to the current PC version - there's nothing lazy about not changing them - why would devs create more work for themselves? HL2 on Xbox would just be a straight port of the PC levels, models, textures and so on, scaling the art assets if necessary to maintain framerate.

As for custom maps, maybe there would be a means for Valve to supply new content - ie a maps directory on the Xbox hdd - and if so, it'd probably be possible for new HL2 Xbox maps to be created and compiled on a PC then copied over to the Xbox (even if Valve don't supply the in's and out's of how to do it, some clued-up punter would doubtless find out). What's for sure is that there wouldn't be a means of creating new maps on the Xbox itself.

As Reno suggests, HL2 Xbox wouldn't be shipped with either CS:S or DoD (too good an opportunity to release as standalone games and make more $$$).

I'm sure it will probably use a similar map editor for HL2 Xbox (if not the same one), and probably the same format systems knowing valve, lazy buggers.

uhh... All they're doing to the content is probably scaling down some textures and maybe splitting some maps to reduce total memory footprints. This is what most people would call "intelligent" and a "worthwhile use of time." In fact, that is exactly how you make a port. Of course it's the same editor; the content is built on a PC anyway. Not like people sit around with worldcraft or maya installed and running on dev kits. :razz:

But it's not like this is all they're doing. Factor in the memory reductions and the code work needed to port the engine/remove a lot of Steam code, plus Live! support (which I assume will be included), and that's still a pretty immense (and tedious!) amount of work. Oh, and they also need to adjust and possibly re-do all the interface work to function smoothly with a controller.

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www.button-masher.net

I heard it was single player only, but I could be wrong. Might be live
support in the way of downloadable content and the usual friends
network stuff I guess.

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

im just going to be stubborn and say hl2 should remain on the pc (though i agree completely with what some of the arguments about money that people have put across)

Its true. EA is going to rule the world. First the are gunna rule
s**tty video games then they are going to ruin all good video games
until they are s**tty. Then they will move onto kitchen ware. And Form
there they will sell realistate and own your house.

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http://img362.imageshack.us/img362/8521/windows981dk.jpg

Nickelplate is my dad

Maybe they'll own the schools and force Windows 98 to learn how to speak English.

Maybe

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http://img362.imageshack.us/img362/8521/windows981dk.jpg

Nickelplate is my dad