You can argue back and forth about whether or not this leak will hurt sales or not. Personally I think it will. Assuming that the April date is correct, that’s 7 months of time where gamers will be looking elsewhere. Most people probably had the money put away for buying it now and some might end up getting annoyed at the delay (especially considering the massive quantities of hardware sold for this particular release). And then of course there’s Christmas. Christmas sells games by the bucket loads!
Also you have to take into account that the increased development time of 7 months is about half the time that most ‘normal’ games take from start to finish. 7 months of rent, wages and degrading hardware on your hands is expensive for Valve, very much so.
On top of that Half-Life 2 had the advantage of a head start with its original September 30th release date. It would have been out ages before Doom3, Halo 2, Duke Nukem Forever (heh) and Painkiller, allowing it to dig itself thoroughly into the marketplace. Especially in terms of mods and let’s not forget that mods for HL1 are currently still selling HL1 copies!
Granted all these games will still sell tremendously, but with the new April release date it now looks as if all these heavy hitters have bunched up in the same quarter. Half-Life 2 will in fact be late! Both Doom 3, Halo 2 and Painkiller are set for March release dates.
For the consumer the first quarter of 2004 and the beginning of the second quarter is going to be a great time to be a gamer, but for the companies it’s going to be publishing hell. I’m putting my money on HL2 and though there is no way to find out, I’ll bet you that this is going to cost a lot of sales for both Valve, id and Bungie. It’s a bit harder to predict Painkiller, it’s getting good previews, but it’s not exactly a prove company; and Poland? Heh.
But guess who benefits from this? Everyone set for release before christmas :) — Max Payne 2 just went gold, I bet they’re happy little ducks right now…
CNN
Also, as HL2 is Xbox exclusive (console-wise) Microsoft is going to loose a lot of money due to the fact that the Xbox release – most likely – will be delayed even further than the PC release (speculation).
Seeing as both Microsoft and Vivendi (publisher) are publicly traded companies that’s bound to sting.
Ah yes, and also there’s of course ATI which paid Valve 6 million dollars to get Half-Life 2 as an excluse bundle with their new XT cards. If April ends up being the shipping date then that’s more or less money out the window and some heavy damage to ATI’s sales figures.
I know I have posted a handful of questions already, but I really dont have any grip with the gaming industry. Why does the leak delay the game?
Ask away, please :)
This is a guestimate, but I’d say it’s a very plausible one and until Valve says otherwise a correct one: In the leaked source code there are parts or worst case scenario, full versions of the network code and Steam. Seeing as Source is going to be the basis of not only Counterstrike which is the most played multiplayer game ever, but also countless other multiplayer mods the network code has to be 100% secure so as to deny people the priviledge of cheating :)
With the code out there it can theoretically be taken apart and examined for any mistakes or loopholes allowing for people to cheat in whatever way they see fit.
So they probably want that closed off and rewritten.
Steam, which is Valve’s new premium content delivery system, basically delivers updates, mods and even full games to the users. If it has holes that can be exploited it could be desasterous for both Valve and its users, perhaps opening up their machines for worms, viruses and other nastiness.
And that’s about it really.