Valve literally gives Half-Life away now, but 27 years ago it was carefully crushing its angry pirates: "None of them had actually bought the game"

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Half-Life is$2 on Steamat the time of writing.

Valve certainly seems to not be worried about Half-Life sales anymore.

It’s a tale as old as time.

“At the time, consumer-level piracy was just becoming a real issue,” Harrington recalled.

All of that put our entire business model at risk.

“Because of gamers like my nephew, we implemented an authentication scheme.

Customers had to validate and register their copy with Valve directly.

Soon gamers were flooding message boards, and they were saying, ‘The game doesn’t work.’

And Mike [Harrington] stressed out, and calls everyone he can find who’s complained.

It turns out none of them had actually bought the game.

So it turned out the authentication system was working really well.”