Computer game maker Valve recently released the much-anticipated Half-Life 2. The first Half-Life was one of the best-received first person shooters in history, and with good reason. It was a great game.
A little more than a year ago, a substantial part of the source code for HL2 was stolen from Valve’s internal servers. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that Valve is now taking theft of their property very seriously.
Playing Half-Life 2 online involves connecting to Valve’s Steam service. This allows you to play against others, and also allows Valve to check the authenticity of your version of the game. The Beeb is reporting that Valve has disabled 20,000 Steam accounts that are using pirated versions. Holy CRAP! The game is out for so short a time, and already Valve can identify and disable 20K stolen versions! Wow. It’s not that I’m surprised at the level of theft, I’m surprised at Valve’s ability to find the pirates. And you know, more power to them. If you want to play, pay. Play fair.
Along the “play fair” lines, while digging deeper into this story I found mention of VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) on the Steam site. It turns out Steam can scan for cheat code applied to the software, and automatically bans accounts for one year that are found to be cheating. To quote their policy:
We will not un-ban you regardless of the reason. It doesn’t matter if someone else used your account, you didn’t know what you were doing was wrong, your brother or sister downloaded a cheat you didn’t know about, etc.
Use of your Steam account is your responsibility.
Gawd, I’d pay money to see the e-mail from the person banned for cheating, has then said that they didn’t know cheating wasn’t allowed, been told by Valve that they’re still banned for a year and complains, “That’s not FAIR!”
Ha! Go Valve!