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[sflufan]

What do you think distribution is?

Why is this anal argument even happening?

This "anal argument" is happening because I simply do not believe that EA's cut of retail sales for Valve games is a measly 2% of the sales price.

My position is that it's significantly higher as EA is the publisher/distributor of the retail copies of Valve games.

 

[speculawyer]

Alright . . . I have a whole 2 potatoes.

 

[Liu Kang Baking A Pie]

This "anal argument" is happening because I simply do not believe that EA's cut of retail sales for Valve games is a measly 2% of the sales price.

My position is that it's significantly higher as EA is the publisher/distributor of the retail copies of Valve games.

God, you even put silly quotes around things.

 

[JaseC]

This "anal argument" is happening because I simply do not believe that EA's cut of retail sales for Valve games is a measly 2% of the sales price.

My position is that it's significantly higher as EA is the publisher/distributor of the retail copies of Valve games.

I can't understand why you're being so rigid about this when you have absolutely no evidence to support your position.

 

[reptilescorpio]

Yes. Every game since Episode One has been self-published by Valve. A quick Google can confirm this for yourself since you seem so doubtful.

Heck, e-mail Gabe if you have to.

I swear I have read at least 10 posts over the past couple of days where you reiterate that Valve publish and EA distribute their games. Not sure if I am going crazy or it is really happening.

Spoiler

Also Valve have indeed distributed their own stuff since the lawsuit. Not sure why it is so hard to believe.

 

[Atomski]

Edit: nvm beatin

 

[Jubbly]

Anybody here get the Top of the Class achievement yet for Defense Grid? I beat both levels on normal and impossible but I can't find any walkthroughs or build orders for CHAS 2 on campaign challenge. Since I got all the potatoes, I'm doing achievements.

For Campaign difficulty: http://imgur.com/a/2McCm#nBMU0 Add some more stuff on the route for Impossible.

 

[sflufan]

I have about as much evidence as you do of yours, sir!

Neither of us know the terms of the arrangement EA and Valve have through the EA Partners program, but I am willing to bet that this "distribution agreement" does involve more revenue to EA than 2%.

I simply cannot see Valve acting as its own publisher for the console versions of the game, especially with the costs of printing the DVDs and the packaging materials.

 

[Dilly]

Release ahead of schedule has dropped from 11 hours to 8 hours.

 

[Blizzard]

Yes. Every game since Episode One has been self-published by Valve. A quick Google can confirm this for yourself since you seem so doubtful.

Heck, e-mail Gabe if you have to.

I tried googling it, and the very first site that came up says this:

On the 22nd, Valve and EA confirmed a distribution agreement, which means that, as usual, EA will be publishing Portal 2 on retail channels, this time through its third-party publishing arm, EA Partners, which distributed APB and will distribute Respawn Entertainment’s games.

EA has been publishing Valve’s games at retail brick-and-mortar stores since 2007′s The Orange Box.

Someone also said below (comments?) that Valve had self-published "for a while" after some "incident" with Vivendi or whatever.

That site (http://lambdageneration.com/posts/valve-and-ea-confirm-retail-distribution-agreement-for-portal-2/) may be totally inaccurate, but if you have better information feel free to link it. It seems to indicate that EA is at least partly "publishing", whatever that means. Maybe the site is confusing publishing/distributing. Or maybe we should go back to complaining about not being able to play Portal 2.

 

[sflufan]

Release ahead of schedule has dropped from 11 hours to 8 hours.

I think it's safe to say this experiment of Valve's -- much like episodic gaming for the Half-Life series -- has been a failure.

Go out and enjoy the nice spring weekend!

 

[CarbonatedFalcon]

I think it's safe to say this experiment of Valve's -- much like episodic gaming for the Half-Life series -- has been a failure.

Go out and enjoy the nice spring weekend!

It's going to be rainy and 50º F here tomorrow

Partly sunny and 63º Sunday though.

 

[dimb]

But if you're seriously arguing that between the ARG, the quality of the games to begin with, and the new, free levels, a half-off sale on all potato games and a 75% off (more, if you own Portal 2) bundle is too expensive - or worse scammy - then you're simply out of your mind.

$30, for a bundle of two or three year old games just doesn't seem like such a hot deal to me. Obviously we just have different view points here. I follow most digital distributors with some regularity, and $30 is kind of the pricing I would expect for a game that is two/three months old. Hot Pursuit and Dead Space 2 hit that pricing already. Bioshock 2 was $5 yesterday, and Borderlands: GOTY wasn't much more. It seems silly that something like Killing Floor costs more than them.

These are some of the best indie games in the past two to three years.
.

Again, this is highly debatable. While there are some great older games in there like SMB and Audiosurf, I find a large chunk of the list to be pretty underwhelming. These are also the stock indie games Valve pushes at this point to me. They're great and all, but it's kind of shitty to see other stuff like VVVVV, Nimbus and Revenge of the Titans consistently ignored for stuff like this.

Cogs, Rush, The Wonderful End of the World, and Aaaaaaaaa, 1...2....3...Kick It!, and The Ball I find to be pretty bland, if not outright mediocre. And the rest of the games just feel aged to me at this point.

If I were to pick out the best indie games from the past two or three years I don't think more than one or two games from this list are worth mentioning next to stuff like Minecraft, Machinarium, Desktop Dungeons, Spelunky and Braid. There are a myriad of great/cheap indie games out there that even aren't on Steam.

What? The Potato Bundle gives you all the games at 75% off. KF is $5, Amnesia $5, Audiosurf $2.50. I haven't seen Amnesia for $5 before.

Amnesia has been $4.80 before. (If you owned a previous Prenumbra title). I don't think all the sales are bad, but to get those deals you have to buy into a bundle with a number of lesser quality/incomplete titles.

 

[reptilescorpio]

I think it's safe to say this experiment of Valve's -- much like episodic gaming for the Half-Life series -- has been a failure.

Go out and enjoy the nice spring weekend!

Hopefully they learn from this last test mistake. The rest of the ARG was great but you are surposed to speed up at the end just before release, not slow everything to a boring crawl watching a bar go up.

Also it is Autumn here. And 5pm.

 

[Atomski]

Go out and enjoy the nice spring weekend!

Stormin like a bitch outside..

Hopefully tomorrow Valve will recalculate some stuff and speed up the damn timer. I am sure they will see the fans getting annoyed soon.

 

[Twig]

Cogs, Rush, The Wonderful End of the World, and Aaaaaaaaa, 1...2....3...Kick It!, and The Ball I find to be pretty bland, if not outright mediocre. And the rest of the games just feel aged to me at this point.

hahahahaha

 

[Jintor]

$30, for a bundle of two or three year old games just doesn't seem like such a hot deal to me. Obviously we just have different view points here. I follow most digital distributors with some regularity, and $30 is kind of the pricing I would expect for a game that is two/three months old. Hot Pursuit and Dead Space 2 hit that pricing already. Bioshock 2 was $5 yesterday, and Borderlands: GOTY wasn't much more. It seems silly that something like Killing Floor costs more than them.

On the other hand, the CoD:BO map pack is going for $15 for 5 maps. I dunno man, pricing is all over the damn place, and the perspective is totally weird when it comes to DD. I mean, $30 for two-month-old games in the retail world is ridiculous. The only perspective where 'this is not a good deal' makes sense is the one where you expect them to match every sale they've ever done before.

 

[butter_stick]

Valve probably have no one working all weekend. They'll just leave it as is and stroll in to work on Monday, and pick the guy that presses the button to release Portal2 3 hours early.

 

[Red]

Hopefully they learn from this last test mistake. The rest of the ARG was great but you are surposed to speed up at the end just before release, not slow everything to a boring crawl watching a bar go up.

Also it is Autumn here. And 5pm.

It's like they're trolling us at this point. Which really fits into the GLadOS theme but doesn't sit well with me considering the effort by players of the ARG. The April Fools line is proving itself true.

hahahahaha

I don't even know what you're trying to say by this.

 

[JaseC]

I tried googling it, and the very first site that came up says this:



Someone also said below (comments?) that Valve had self-published "for a while" after some "incident" with Vivendi or whatever.

That site (http://lambdageneration.com/posts/valve-and-ea-confirm-retail-distribution-agreement-for-portal-2/) may be totally inaccurate, but if you have better information feel free to link it. It seems to indicate that EA is at least partly "publishing", whatever that means. Maybe the site is confusing publishing/distributing. Or maybe we should go back to complaining about not being able to play Portal 2.

It seems the agreement, when made public, wasn't explained particularly well. Some sites mention publishing and distribution, others mention just one of the two.

If EA were in fact publishing Valve's games, surely they'd be mentioned as the publisher in addition to Valve, and EA's logo would be on the box art of retail copies.

I've e-mailed Gabe and asked him for clarification. If/When he replies (which he should!), I'll post it here.

I think it's safe to say this experiment of Valve's -- much like episodic gaming for the Half-Life series -- has been a failure.

Go out and enjoy the nice spring weekend!

Valve have said themselves that "episode" was a bad choice of phrase considering Episode One and Two were late. Then there's the fact Episode Three is still nowhere to be seen outside of a few concept art pieces.

 

[Jubbly]

If I were to pick out the best indie games from the past two or three years I don't think more than one or two games from this list are worth mentioning next to stuff like Minecraft, Machinarium, Desktop Dungeons, Spelunky and Braid. There are a myriad of great/cheap indie games out there that even aren't on Steam.

Not on Steam; doesn't lend itself well to the ARG stuff; not on Steam; not on Steam; dev extremely busy with new game.

You have to remember, the developers had to work on new content for their games also. Stuff like The Ball and Killing Floor updates don't happen overnight.

 

[Jubbly]

Valve probably have no one working all weekend. They'll just leave it as is and stroll in to work on Monday, and pick the guy that presses the button to release Portal2 3 hours early.

Friend of mine who works at Valve is there this very minute polishing Portal 2 and has been at all hours of the day and night for the past week.

 

[shintoki]

$30, for a bundle of two or three year old games just doesn't seem like such a hot deal to me. Obviously we just have different view points here. I follow most digital distributors with some regularity, and $30 is kind of the pricing I would expect for a game that is two/three months old. Hot Pursuit and Dead Space 2 hit that pricing already. Bioshock 2 was $5 yesterday, and Borderlands: GOTY wasn't much more. It seems silly that something like Killing Floor costs more than them.

Again, this is highly debatable. While there are some great older games in there like SMB and Audiosurf, I find a large chunk of the list to be pretty underwhelming. These are also the stock indie games Valve pushes at this point to me. They're great and all, but it's kind of shitty to see other stuff like VVVVV, Nimbus and Revenge of the Titans consistently ignored for stuff like this.

Cogs, Rush, The Wonderful End of the World, and Aaaaaaaaa, 1...2....3...Kick It!, and The Ball I find to be pretty bland, if not outright mediocre. And the rest of the games just feel aged to me at this point.

If I were to pick out the best indie games from the past two or three years I don't think more than one or two games from this list are worth mentioning next to stuff like Minecraft, Machinarium, Desktop Dungeons, Spelunky and Braid. There are a myriad of great/cheap indie games out there that even aren't on Steam.

Amnesia has been $4.80 before. (If you owned a previous Prenumbra title). I don't think all the sales are bad, but to get those deals you have to buy into a bundle with a number of lesser quality/incomplete titles.

I'll agree with some of this. Valve really needs to start to rotate out some of the indie titles. Audiosurf, Killing Floor, and Defense Grid have all been on sale multiple times, and included in multiple bundles already.

But, I'd argue that stuff you call mediocre may not be mediocre to another. It's probably much better to put stuff like that into it, allowing you to maybe get a hit or two out of 7, for the price of two games. Then to completely avoid everything in the bundle.

 

[XeroSauce]

I'll agree with some of this. Valve really needs to start to rotate out some of the indie titles. Audiosurf, Killing Floor, and Defense Grid have all been on sale multiple times, and included in multiple bundles already.

But, I'd argue that stuff you call mediocre may not be mediocre to another. It's probably much better to put stuff like that into it, allowing you to maybe get a hit or two out of 7, for the price of two games. Then to completely avoid everything in the bundle.

Valve has certain indie developers that they like and keep close to, look at Turtle Rock and Telltale Games. Tripwire/Degobaan Games have a very good connection with Valve.

 

[Blizzard]

Friend of mine who works at Valve is there this very minute polishing Portal 2 and has been at all hours of the day and night for the past week.

PC version only polish I would assume? Last-minute work does not bode well for a bugfree release but we can cross our fingers.

 

[Original-Blue]

Holy ahit aaaaaaaa is awesome!

 

[celebi23]

Fuck yeah. I've got 24 potatoes so far. I might actually pull this off

 

[JaseC]

Friend of mine who works at Valve is there this very minute polishing Portal 2 and has been at all hours of the day and night for the past week.

Ask him about Episode Three. Just be sure to meet in a secluded place so Lombardi doesn't overhear him.

And by "secluded place" I don't mean a dark alley. All those knives in Gabe's office...

 

[Twig]

I don't even know what you're trying to say by this.

I wasn't saying, I was laughing. Indicated by the repeated "ha" - a common written form for the sound of laughter. It was laughable. So I laughed.

 

[Luigi87]

Just got potato #36.

Big thanks to the people whom worked their brains figuring the heavy stuff out.

 

[Twig]

PC version only polish I would assume? Last-minute work does not bode well for a bugfree release but we can cross our fingers.

Yeah, but no one cares about the console release of a Valve game, anyway.

OH SNAP.

 

[Ferrio]

Wow a projected 6 hours earlier.... that's crappy.

Kinda upset about the early thing... i scheduled leave work for release day...

 

[CrookedRain]

Wow a projected 6 hours earlier.... that's crappy.

Kinda upset about the early thing... i scheduled leave work for release day...

20 actually. Used to be 26.

 

[L00P]

IMO this arg thing should have ended after the first countdown. I feel like the community is just grinding brainlessly after that.

I always knew there was a chance of a countdown of another countdown, but I didn't expect Valve to do just that! kinda funny

 

[Ramenman]

I'm probably very late with that "guess", but with people seemingly thinking they'll get the game this weekend it's probably worth pointing out again.

Since "the wonderful end of the world computations completed = time to launch -1 hour", this probably means that we won't get Portal 2 earlier than 13 hours early at best right ?

Unless some games are worth more hours, since their gauge is harder to fill (but then it probably means it won't be filled so...).

 

[CarbonatedFalcon]

Unless something changes significantly after completing another bar (or otherwise), the way it's going it doesn't look like it will be released earlier than Monday.

Just have to check tomorrow and see what's up. I noted some of the current stats, so I'll compare them later today when I wake up.

 

[Zombie James]

IMO this arg thing should have ended after the first countdown. I feel like the community is just grinding brainlessly after that.

I feel the same way. The ARG was an epic journey and got everyone hyped, capped off by an equally epic countdown... leading to hours of grinding on indie games so minutes can be shaved off the release date? I had a lot more fun scanning QR codes and looking at cryptic images than watching progress bars fill up at a snail's pace. At this point Portal 2's only three days away from release anyways, I don't think any substantial amount of time is going to be saved.

 

[Zomba13]

I'm probably very late with that "guess", but with people seemingly thinking they'll get the game this weekend it's probably worth pointing out again.

Since "the wonderful end of the world computations completed = time to launch -1 hour", this probably means that we won't get Portal 2 earlier than 13 hours early at best right ?

Unless some games are worth more hours, since their gauge is harder to fill (but then it probably means it won't be filled so...).

I think the projected Launch Time is the 'new' release date if we don't finish the launch computations (the main bar at the top). Like, it'll definitely launch in 77 hours and 51 minutes but we can get it even earlier if we finish the launch computations bar by playing the games.

 

[CrookedRain]

Maybe they're making some changes. Says 0 Current CPUs for all games now.

 

[iSimon]

Looks like we broke GLaDOS, all CPU counters are showing 0.

Spoiler

Release cancelled.

 

[Mister_Bubbles]

Oh, Valve :/

And it was all going so well.

 

[Zomba13]

Maybe they're making some changes. Says 0 Current CPUs for all games now.

I hope so. Hopefully they are making it easier. There really isn't much point to this if all we're getting is a day earlier at best.

 

[JaseC]

I think the projected Launch Time is the 'new' release date if we don't finish the launch computations (the main bar at the top). Like, it'll definitely launch in 77 hours and 51 minutes but we can get it even earlier if we finish the launch computations bar by playing the games.

I think you're right, as it's referred to as the default boot.

 

[Ozone]

Maybe they're making some changes. Says 0 Current CPUs for all games now.

Gabe is threatening the Web team with his knife demanding they adjust the numbers.

 

[TheExodu5]

Currently scheduled to come out 5.21 hours ahead of launch. That's 5AM EST on Tuesday morning. Unless it comes out early Monday evening (which would be closer to 15 hours ahead of launch, which would require triple the contributions), this is all pointless. Most of us work on Tuesday and are not going to be staying up until 5AM to play the game.

 

[The M.O.B]

back up :/

I wish it would go down forever

 

[JaseC]

Currently scheduled to come out 5.21 hours ahead of launch. That's 5AM EST on Tuesday morning. Unless it comes out early Monday evening (which would be closer to 15 hours ahead of launch, which would require triple the contributions), this is all pointless. Most of us work on Tuesday and are not going to be staying up until 5AM to play the game.

As above, I agree with Zomba's assessment of the counter.

Gabe is threatening the Web team with his countless knives demanding they adjust the numbers.

Fixed.

 

[EatChildren]

Currently scheduled to come out 5.21 hours ahead of launch. That's 5AM EST on Tuesday morning. Unless it comes out early Monday evening (which would be closer to 15 hours ahead of launch, which would require triple the contributions), this is all pointless. Most of us work on Tuesday and are not going to be staying up until 5AM to play the game.

There are other places in the world, you know.

 

[Zombie James]

Currently scheduled to come out 5.21 hours ahead of launch. That's 5AM EST on Tuesday morning. Unless it comes out early Monday evening (which would be closer to 15 hours ahead of launch, which would require triple the contributions), this is all pointless. Most of us work on Tuesday and are not going to be staying up until 5AM to play the game.

Yeah, i'm not going to stay up that late or wake up that early.

 

[CrookedRain]

People need to stop using the hasportal2releasedyet site. It's doing the calculations wrong and not taking the amount completed into account.