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Comment by simjue | Hacker News Reader

It's not free forever, only until march when Alyx launch's.

I imagine they will make it free forever. We're nearly approaching two decades of the game being sold and it was one of the first digitally distributed games as well. Can't imagine there are many Steam accounts without HL2 and I don't imagine there are many PC gamers without a Steam account.

It would great incentive offered by Valve to simply have a Steam account.

Relevant XKCD? https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

Before I clicked, I expected it to be this one https://www.xkcd.com/606/

I agree, there already were countless opportunities to buy the series for next to nothing during sales.

I actually created my Steam account after receiving a coupon for a "free game" from a Steam representative at the 2008 Leipzig Games Convention. When redeeming the coupon, the "free game" turned out to be the Orange Box.

That coupon was certainly a good business decision for Valve. My library now contains 100+ games.

IIRC, my Steam account dates back to a bundle code in a CD for what I believe was an HL: Blue Shift bundle and an encouragement to use Steam for multiplayer because of better anti-cheat protection, around when that was new enough (it came out in 2001 and Steam officially launched in 2003, so it was maybe two or three years after the original launch as a bundle?), that code included all of HL1 up to that point. It's weird to recall there was a period where I had the entire Steam catalog unlocked, but it's also been a long time since the entire Steam catalog was just HL1 and its expansions and mods.

This was back in an ancient dial up age when downloading a CD's worth of game seemed crazy, but I liked the idea of having a "backup" of the CD accessible just in case.

If it's anything like episode 3, I guess it's defacto free forever.

I think you're probably joking but it's not the same thing at all. Episode 3 was never given a launch date, was it?

Kind of. They said a new episode would be released each year, but Episode 3 never came out.

Ignoring the "every three months" thing... In May 2006, as they were launching episode 1, they promised episode 2 later in the year and episode 3 by "Christmas 2007".

Looks that they got caught in Valve Time for good: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

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