Projected release date, from reliable sources, have set it for November 16 and while this is not news, the fact it may not meet this release date due to publisher Vivendi Universal is. Take that back, the fact it will likely miss another release date is nothing new. This in from a press release earlier,

"If you have purchased a copy of Half-Life 2, we are sorry you are still waiting to play. This is not Valve's choice. Vivendi is insisting that the game has not yet been released, and has threatened that Valve would be in violation of its contract if we activate the Half-Life 2 Steam authentication servers at this time."

Just as those before, with HL1, the plan of attack is to make Valve violate the contract in one way or another and somehow confiscate HL2 for their own. I've heard of this before and I think what happens is, the company (in this case Valve Software) will have to give up all rights to the material (HL2, which may or may not include Source) to Vivendi Universal. If that would happen, Vivendi would stand to make a lot of money by releasing it and not having to give Valve their cut...

My memory fails me a lot now, but I think Sierra tried to do the same thing and actually succeeded for the most part with HL1, that is, in some areas...not too sure on that one anymore though.

me shakes fists in the air.

I dont think it will be delayed. The problems are related to STEAM and the fact that VALVE wants to release the activation codes for the game now. Vivendi says "NO" because they want a strick release date.

So.. all the problems we are seeing here are because of that STEAM engine. Vivendi wants release control. Hey.. I can see their point.. they are the publishers. VALVE is trying to forego the publisher and Vivendi would have no control over the STEAM engine. That would upset me too.

So now.. it may acutally be possible to get the game even today off the shelf. But you cannot activate the game until the release.

... And this brings me to another concern. Is it true that I can only activate HL2 once on one machine? Is Microsoft in on this? Am I getting bad rumors?

Anyway... all this is based on rumors. None of these have been announced by an official rep. I guess we are stuck waiting another day for confirmation.

don't konw about all that, but i do know what i posted, in italics, was quoted from valve's own mouth...

one of the main reasons valve is doing this is because in the original hl deal, they only got what i heard was 150k out of around 900k profit, the publisher, sierra, got the rest of the money, now those figures arent correct, but they aint far off AT ALL and i could prove it, but i dont have the time to look up those links...lost the bookmarks stuff, but anyways...yeah, the whole purpose valve has stated, was to release without a publisher

if they could pull that off, even majority of their sales on steam for hl2, would set them with an extra umph of a financial backing for the next title they produce...of which i hear there are a few (and vivendi has stated they want all of them)