Hey people, having the same feeling about Valve?

You never know, Valve may do what Epic did and remove the disc check in a patch - especially given they will want to keep Steam for authentication/content delivery/patches.

 

That was two years after the game was released, if I remember correctly?

 

I didn't expect them to buy enough hardware to handle it, but I did expect them to rent enough servers and bandwidth to handle it.

If they are going to promote Steam as as viable distribution system, they'll need to show that they can handle tripple A games with millions of people awaiting it's release, and not a system that crumbles on release-day.
Especially when you have all those pre-orders to base your demand expectations on...

Compare it to regular retail, where the only choke point is in getting enough copies to the stores. This again is divided into how many copies are needed to fulfill the pre-orders, and how many is estimated to buy the first date. If the shop runs out, make sure you have adequate supplies on hand that you can rush to the store.

It all comes down to logistics, and in this regard I feel Valve bothced the job.
A shop in Norway (small country) ran out of HL2 boxes on the release date, but it only took about one hour to get a new shipment to the store.
If Valve had been able to bring enough hardware online to deal with demand one hour after is was obvious the current system wasn't going to be able to handle it, then I'd applaud them for doing a good job, but having to wait a day for the system to reach a load-level it could cope with isn't good enough in my book. Especially not when a publisher uses 1 hour to fulfill requests in a small country.

 

No, for UT2K4 they killed the CD check at the first or the second patch. IIRC it was only a couple of months after release.

You are probably thinking of UT2K3 where it took a lot longer for Epic to get rid of the CD check.

 

Two short thoughts. First, i'm sure whether or not to remove the CD/DVD check is Vivendis descision, not Valves. Second, will the patch be available through multiple channels or exclusively via steam?