Page 15: Broken Promises
Gabe Newell loves his fans. He answers their e-mails all the time. He even answers their weird e-mails. Like the one in which a fan asked Gabe if he'd trade some sexual favors in return for an advance copy of the game. ("Whose sexual favors?" he wrote back. "If they are Cameron Diaz's, and you get my wife to agree, then you're on.") Newell says he gets more than 400 e-mails a day from fans who want to check in with him and see how things are going.
Sometimes the fans even call him at home--at 3am. He briefly indulges them in conversation and then politely asks them to call at a more reasonable hour. For Gabe almost everything at Valve is done for "the fans." You'd be hard-pressed to find another developer in the game industry who spends more time writing to fans, posting on forums, and even giving fans tours of the Valve office. Why spend so much time talking to the fans? "They pay the bills," Newell says.
The release date was so uncertain that one fan created a game of 'Half-Life 2 Release Date Twister'.
Why would a guy who cares so much about his fans keep them in the dark for months on end about the state of Half-Life 2? During the summer of 2003 Newell practically stopped communicating with the fan community. No one knew what to think. But they trusted Gabe. If the game wasn't going to ship on September 30, the fans figured that Gabe would come out and tell them that. Or at least he'd admit that the game might be delayed. But Gabe said nothing and the fans took that to mean good news.
But on the night of September 23 the truth emerged. Exactly one week before the game was supposed to ship, Valve released a short statement to the Shacknews Web site. "The previously announced September 30 release date for Half-Life 2 is being pushed back. We are currently targeting a holiday release, but do not have a specific 'in store' date to share at this time."
The fans were stunned. A month ago Valve was confirming a September 30 ship date. And now Valve claimed the date had been pushed back? The fans didn't understand. Why did Valve create a false sense of hope? Why did they string us along for so long? Why would Valve, a company that seemed to do everything for "the fans," turn around and bite the hand that had fed it so well?
As September 30 approached, Newell turned down interview requests, and no one at Valve would elaborate on the state of the game. The fans were enraged. After all the hype and all the buildup, they began to wonder what else Valve might have been lying about. Perhaps the cynics were right--maybe the E3 demo really was a sham or a facade. Some fans remembered Team Fortress 2, a game that was announced at E3 in 1999, won countless awards, and then disappeared shortly afterward. Was Valve up to its old tricks again--was Half-Life 2 going to disappear like Team Fortress 2? The webmaster of one Half-Life fan site posted a bitter missive on Valve: "The bottom line is this: I'm not a fan of Valve anymore. I don't believe a damn thing they say and I'm sick of their bulls***." Valve, the company that had created one of the greatest PC games of all time, now seemed to have pulled off one of the greatest cases of deception ever seen in the game industry.
The fans felt burned. They wanted answers. The problem was that Valve wasn't giving any. Until now.
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