ValveSoftware
GoldSrc games should be free to play.
Now that the scene is getting development, we should take into consideration that Counter-Strike/Half-Life and probably the entire GoldSource library has a No-steam version.
There are several issues/feature request that are considered to be implemented in the future but will break the game for "illegal clients" such as the famous No-steam client.
#12
Extending the engine limits will for sure break the game and is a high-priority feature request and has been considered to be added but should not based on Mike comment from another issue made by me.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife/issues/2149#issuecomment-485885151
As Mike said, any changes made to the game should take into consideration any sort of client even if that's illegal or not.
CS:GO is already Free To Play, Dota 2 is Free To Play and Dota Underlords is Free To Play (They are all Valve games), I am sure its the right time to make all the GoldSrc library Free To Play or at least start with CS 1.6/HL.
No-steam clients will for sure start playing on Steam version (active development, bug fixes, VAC) and will decrease the Slowhacking/Fake servers/Cheating.
More legal servers will start appearing, the Internet tab will be more clear than now and fake servers will do less damage.
There are a lot of valid points why the GoldSrc library should be Free To Play now that we are on the Twenty years of this saga. (and for sure SDK will be released in the future)
@mikela-valve is there a chance or has been talked on Valve if GoldSrc games can be Free To Play in the future?
I was wondering why could you play Source Mods without owning any Base Game but you could not play GoldSource mods unless you owned exactly Half-Life. (MP at least)
I know it has to do something with TF2 going F2P but this quirk still bothers me to this day.
Note that we're talking about making goldsrc-based games "Free to play", mentioning nothing about the source code of the game, so ID software has nothing to do in this topic, as a reminder. Releasing this game without a price will for sure kill no-steam software (related to goldsrc), thing that will solve many issues about security and compatibility that are actually conserning the community. There would be a chance to modify lots of engine-server related issues that can break compatibility with old libraries (thing that @mikela-valve knows more than good), and bringing a way to make this game popular again as the great classic fps-shooter of all time.
As much as I want this to happen, I doubt that it will. All the other games you mentioned have an alternate monetization scheme, and half-life does not (and should not). Personally, I'd rather have the source code released, as that opens up more possibilities for modding, and it's already been acknowledged by Mike. The main issues bought up was how that would affect cheating and piracy, and making valve's goldsrc games free would mostly fix one of those things, since piracy would be unnecessary.
As much as I want this to happen, I doubt that it will. All the other games you mentioned have an alternate monetization scheme, and half-life does not (and should not). Personally, I'd rather have the source code released, as that opens up more possibilities for modding, and it's already been acknowledged by Mike. The main issues bought up was how that would affect cheating and piracy, and making valve's goldsrc games free would mostly fix one of those things, since piracy would be unnecessary.
Dota Underlords does not have a monetization scheme (at the moment). GoldSource games needs to be free to play, 20 years already and the community is getting smaller every year and servers are growing on the No-steam scene with virus/slowhacking. Cheating is out of control and piracy too, probably making all the games free to play will solve a lot of problems and will make the progress of the game more easy to handle now that you wont relay on adding/fixing/removing things without affecting illegal clients.
I would love to see the game F2P but i still think that there's a lot of work to be done before doing it.
@Maxi605 I haven't seen a single post here talking about if GoldSource games can be F2P in the near future, so this should be the first step, lets hope to see Mike reply here even if its bad/good, its well known that we still have plenty of security updates on the game before doing anything big, at least we can have a decent discussion here and pray for a Valve member reply :)
@Maxi605 I haven't seen a single post here talking about if GoldSource games can be F2P in the near future, so this should be the first step, lets hope to see Mike reply here even if its bad/good, its well known that we still have plenty of security updates on the game before doing anything big, at least we can have a decent discussion here and pray for a Valve member reply :)
There was one if i remember correctly, but sure, it's the best to know what mike and valve would considered. I'm running 10 servers with dproto, if the game gets a F2P release i'm more than likely to remove dproto.
I would love to see the game F2P but i still think that there's a lot of work to be done before doing it.
Like what? There's nothing more to do than discussing this, there shouldn't be any other changes on the game. Actual non-steam equivalents do the same, you will have a launcher but without any costs, leaving an opportunity to play the game updated. I don't know if there's people nowadays buying this or other goldsrc games. But there will be for sure a lot of players inside of it if this happens (and it may not be taken in account, considering they only want money)
I think it is time to join both sides (steam-no steam) and continue to grow as a community of cs steam, in Latin America there are many non-steam players, there is no way to have a server with only steam. I hope the game will be free soon.
I would love to see the game F2P but i still think that there's a lot of work to be done before doing it.
Well, doing GoldSrc games to F2P. It will help to increase the Steam community, and for sure, the github will be more used to report issues and another requests.
Yes, there is a lot of work to be done. But making game F2P will help to that work. All will be advantages.
Think of this from Valve's perspective.
What would Valve gain out of making the games free? They won't receive any money from those games anymore - but you think making it free, and encouraging people to raise more tickets, is somehow going to encourage Valve to do... What exactly?
They're not going to be any more inclined to support a product just because it's free.
Valve's other Free 2 Play titles are free because they make money through other schemes. Those schemes don't work for a game such as Half-Life.
And Valve are expected to care about people unwilling to adopt Steam or choosing to play the game illegally? It's a teeny tiny market that they don't care about because they're not customers, and to be honest I think that's totally fair enough.
The best thing Valve could do is make GoldSrc open source. That's probably going to provide the best of both worlds, but I see absolutely no incentive for Valve to make the games available for free.
And Valve are expected to care about people unwilling to adopt Steam or choosing to play the game illegally? It's a teeny tiny market that they don't care about because they're not customers, and to be honest I think that's totally fair enough.
This is an asinine statement. Non-steam CS1.6 players far outnumber legal CS1.6 players, Valve attempting to bring them over to the official supported platform will give Valve marketshare (Believe it or not many non-steam players don't even know what Steam is) and could easily boost Counter-Strike to one of the most played games in Steam, remember CS has a steady playerbase of 10k players daily.
If you're talking about Valve having incentive: Open Sourcing the engine would do more harm than making the games free, and would actually drive players away from Steam. (Note that I'm not against open sourcing, I'm just making a point)
Think of this from Valve's perspective.
What would Valve gain out of making the games free? They won't receive any money from those games anymore - but you think making it free, and encouraging people to raise more tickets, is somehow going to encourage Valve to do... What exactly?
They're not going to be any more inclined to support a product just because it's free.
Valve's other Free 2 Play titles are free because they make money through other schemes. Those schemes don't work for a game such as Half-Life.
And Valve are expected to care about people unwilling to adopt Steam or choosing to play the game illegally? It's a teeny tiny market that they don't care about because they're not customers, and to be honest I think that's totally fair enough.
The best thing Valve could do is make GoldSrc open source. That's probably going to provide the best of both worlds, but I see absolutely no incentive for Valve to make the games available for free.
It is a open-secret that Valve has been thinking on releasing the SDK for free in the future, as I said, the game is already 20 years old and the price remains the same, people is not buying GoldSrc games anymore because there are a lot of free options like CS:GO who is the top game alongside Dota 2 and CS/HL is not that "cheap" for a game that has been around for years.
@LucesEnBabel
This is an asinine statement. Non-steam CS1.6 players far outnumber legal CS1.6 players, Valve attempting to bring them over to the official supported platform will give Valve marketshare (Believe it or not many non-steam players don't even know what Steam is) and could easily boost Counter-Strike to one of the most played games in Steam, remember CS has a steady playerbase of 10k players daily.
And this is just pure fantasy. Do you seriously think the number of Non-Steam players are substantial enough for Valve to care?
On top of that, if they're not using Steam already, what makes you think making the game free will convince them? If price is seriously the problem, I think they've got other issues to worry about.
I would love to see the game F2P but i still think that there's a lot of work to be done before doing it.
Like what? There's nothing more to do than discussing this, there shouldn't be any other changes on the game. Actual non-steam equivalents do the same, you will have a launcher but without any costs, leaving an opportunity to play the game updated. I don't know if there's people nowadays buying this or other goldsrc games. But there will be for sure a lot of players inside of it if this happens (and it may not be taken in account, considering they only want money)
There's still many problems with the game itself and more each update, hitboxes for example.
Also many of no-steam users still play the game due to the lack of a decent PC, Steam doesn't support Windows XP anymore (a lot of no-steam players use XP)
Think of this from Valve's perspective.
What would Valve gain out of making the games free? They won't receive any money from those games anymore - but you think making it free, and encouraging people to raise more tickets, is somehow going to encourage Valve to do... What exactly?
They don't gain anything having the game to sell when there's a second option (no-steam) and it's known that the biggest part of the game playerbase play on the no-steam clients.
On top of that, if they're not using Steam already, what makes you think making the game free will convince them? If price is seriously the problem, I think they've got other issues to worry about.
Well, most if not all servers would drop out from supporting no-steam since it causes more trouble than solutions so the players are either force to move to the original client (Updated client and with support) or find another server to play on.
They don't gain anything having the game to sell when there's a second option (no-steam) and it's known that the biggest part of the game playerbase play on the no-steam clients.
Again, those who choose not to buy the game or own the game on Steam (if you have a valid CD-key you can activate your Steam copy) aren't customers to begin with. The game isn't expensive, that userbase clearly has another motive as to why they don't use the Steam version.
You've seriously got to be kidding me if the whole reason behind making Half-Life etc. free is because y'all can't afford $10.
No, I am not talking about the price at all, that is just one of the 100 reasons why the GoldSource library should be free... is not that expensive but the player base is decreasing every month/year and it will keep dropping if nothing is done (in a big scale).
You need to acknowledge that many countries from Europe or Asia got no chance to buy games on Steam more than giveaways/cracked version (probably 70% of the population from the game) as I said, I am fine if we get a @mikela-valve response even if that's a good/negative response.
They don't gain anything having the game to sell when there's a second option (no-steam) and it's known that the biggest part of the game playerbase play on the no-steam clients.
Again, those who choose not to buy the game or own the game on Steam (if you have a valid CD-key you can activate your Steam copy) aren't customers to begin with. The game isn't expensive, that userbase clearly has another motive as to why they don't use the Steam version.
You've seriously got to be kidding me if the whole reason behind making Half-Life etc. free is because y'all can't afford $10.
The price isn't the issue, the issue is that there's a free version and most servers have support for it, there's no need to buy a game when you don't need to.
The price isn't the issue, the issue is that there's a free version and most servers have support for it, there's no need to buy a game when you don't need to.
By free you mean illegal then. Just because there's an avenue to play the game illegally is no legit reason for something to be free, otherwise that would apply to almost everything out there.
I strongly disagree with this. CS:GO and Dota 2 is free because they fit today's standarts. Even though they are free they still make money from in-game items. And i'm pretty sure CSGOTeam made CS:GO free so they can gather data for VACnet. For Half-Life and Counter-Strike, classic titles shouldn't be free. Valve is pretty generous about their games when there's a Steam sale. It's cheaper than free. Currently there's Halloween Sale and game is literally in %90 sale. Using non-steam is a cheap excuse.
You can see global price tag.
https://steamdb.info/app/70/
@BlackShadow Price is not an issue at all, but you need to understand that 70% userbase of the game is on Europe where certain countries does not allow payments to steam or are too hard to get, No-steam have by far a large amount of users playing on them than on Steam itself, that will just cause problems due to fake servers/slowhacking, gameplay experience is being destroyed due to cheats being free and easy to install on No-steam clients.
If game gets free, more legal servers will start appearing and more people will be covered with VAC/slowhacking filters, more players will start playing on a secure platform/server and more people will start playing the game. Is not something about price, we are fine with that.
I mean Steam provides variety of payment options if they want to buy it with money. At least one of the payment method should be suitable for them. And if there's a Steam sale you can play free games and sell their trading cards and make money from it. You still can get it for free.
However you're missing something.
Making it free will make it cheat vulnurable. If it was free, people will able to create cheats easily because when they got banned, they can just open a new Steam account and test it until they succeed.
The price isn't the issue, the issue is that there's a free version and most servers have support for it, there's no need to buy a game when you don't need to.
By free you mean illegal then. Just because there's an avenue to play the game illegally is no legit reason for something to be free, otherwise that would apply to almost everything out there.
You asked the reason and i gave it to you.
And i'm pretty sure CSGOTeam made CS:GO free so they can gather data for VACnet.
Releasing the game free in the case of CS:GO as most people think it was a bad idea, the "VACnet" doesn't seem to be pretty useful and it probably wont for a couple more years.
The issue with GoldSource games is that they're dying, every year there's less and less players on them, if they don't want to release it for free then it should drop in price, anything to help the playerbase grow, otherwise, they don't win either way since there'll be no players on the game.
Making it free will make it cheat vulnurable. If it was free, people will able to create cheats easily because when they got banned, they can just open a new Steam account and test it until they succeed.
Already is. The same issue is happening to CS:GO, that didn't stop them releasing it for free.
Already is. The same issue is happening to CS:GO, that didn't stop them releasing it for free.
We don't know the "actual" reason why they decided to make it free. Like i said my best guess was VACnet. VACnet is still not active. Valve is still gathering data right now. Free game = more data for VACnet. Only cheat i know working in Steam right now for Counter-Strike is Aimware other than that i don't know if there's any private cheats out there. But there is probaly. Yet still i find cheap how people can't literally pay $1 when the game is on sale. I get that you may don't want to pay the full price. And that's the sales are for. Instead of making it free Valve should break the non-steam and force them to use Steam version. I just cannot support piracy when it comes to Valve. And making games like these for free just disrespectful.
Already is. The same issue is happening to CS:GO, that didn't stop them releasing it for free.
We don't know the "actual" reason why they decided to make it free. Like i said my best guess was VACnet. VACnet is still not active. Valve is still gathering data right now. Free game = more data for VACnet. Only cheat i know working in Steam right now for Counter-Strike is Aimware other than that i don't know if there's any private cheats out there. But there is probaly. Yet still i find cheap how people can't literally pay $1 when the game is on sale. I get that you may don't want to pay the full price. And that's the sales are for. Instead of making it free Valve should break the non-steam and force them to use Steam version. I just cannot support piracy when it comes to Valve. And making games like these for free just disrespectful.
Oh, ok. I mean, i get it, i do but i don't see many other options to keep the game alive. And cheating on the Steam version of the game (CS 1.6) is still possible, i reported someone that i caught cheating on one of my servers (he was using steam) and never got vac banned, i think i even linked the cheat to mike, nothing came of it afaik. I personally do giveaways everytime the game is in sale since people don't really buy the game because they get it 'free'.
The best thing Valve could do is make GoldSrc open source. That's probably going to provide the best of both worlds, but I see absolutely no incentive for Valve to make the games available for free.
First step is to be free, then open source.
Making it free will make it cheat vulnurable. If it was free, people will able to create cheats easily because when they got banned, they can just open a new Steam account and test it until they succeed.
I doubt that supposition. The problem is the same, currently players play on non-steam and are practically impossible to ban them from servers.
First step is to be free, then open source.
Care to elaborate on the reasoning here?
I doubt that supposition. The problem is the same, currently players play on non-steam and are practically impossible to ban them from servers.
I'm not saying current CS is cheat free don't get me wrong. But making it free will make even more vulnurable. People will start to make more cheats since it's free.
I doubt that supposition. The problem is the same, currently players play on non-steam and are practically impossible to ban them from servers.
I'm not saying current CS is cheat free don't get me wrong. But making it free will make even more vulnurable. People will start to make more cheats since it's free.
People will cheat either way, the anticheat needs to be improved first then if it ever gets to be considered to be free.
QUAKE and DOOM is paid even if it is open source.
But we have a special case with GoldSrc, although they are as old as GoldSrc, HL/CS16 was able maintain an daily active community up until now, but the problem is that the community is mainly non-steam.
So I think that in the case of goldsrc it is something very good that they can put the games for free2play, at least for one or two years, until most servers are only Steam.
This is the situation in my country (AR): (they are invented numbers, but they are not so far from reality, i having a community of cs 1.6 for years and knowing the players, the numbers come naturally)
Servers:
- 98% of the servers are rent with dproto (years ago also included sxe injected 100%)
- many steam players do not update last version because there are still servers with sxe injected (anti cheat discontinued)
Players CS 1.6 (public servers):
- 75% of players playing non-steam, 25% playing on steam.
- 80% of players have Steam installed, 75% have some game purchased.
- 65% of players have a credit card to use at any time.
- 40% of players have cs1.6 steam, but 15% prefer playing non-steam for some reason.
