The Portal 2 Pre-release Thread - Now Decrypting!

Portal Two

  • I have or plan to pre-purchase.

    Votes: 175 51.0%
  • I'm planning to get it on release day.

    Votes: 34 9.9%
  • I'm waiting for reviews from game sites/friends before deciding.

    Votes: 41 12.0%
  • Not buying it until it hits a steep discount.

    Votes: 81 23.6%
  • Not interested at all.

    Votes: 12 3.5%

  • Total voters
    343
Status
Not open for further replies.
Why couldn't it be a good deal on games I actually want. I don't want any of these games.
 
Didn't see that, but I already had Portal so the extra one provides no value, and would assume that is the case for most people preordering it on Steam.

Ya, I hate Valve bundles sometimes. Like when I bought the Orange Box. Paid for HL2, when I already had it. They had to be greedy and not release the Black Box. I'm sure when they release Episode 3 (maybe in 2020 or some crap), they'll produce only like...an ultimate box. Which has HL2, Ep 1, Ep 2, Portal, Portal 2, TF2, and other crap that everyone already owns.
 
Ya, I hate Valve bundles sometimes. Like when I bought the Orange Box. Paid for HL2, when I already had it. They had to be greedy and not release the Black Box. I'm sure when they release Episode 3 (maybe in 2020 or some crap), they'll produce only like...an ultimate box. Which has HL2, Ep 1, Ep 2, Portal, Portal 2, TF2, and other crap that everyone already owns.

They released every game "exclusive" to the OB separately right after it released.
 
Ya, too bad they don't seperate them before they actually release it. Which kind of defeats the purpose of preordering to preload. Guess they'd much rather have ppl being unable to activate on release day.
 
The Portal song in AudioSurf was actually very good, I was taken by surprise when GlaDOS told me I had the wrong music selected. :p
 
Ya, too bad they don't seperate them before they actually release it. Which kind of defeats the purpose of preordering to preload. Guess they'd much rather have ppl being unable to activate on release day.

On the plus side anyone that waited was actually able to play their games right afterwards. Steam ground to a complete halt when OB launched.
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

if you already own these games on Steam. play each one sometime today:

•1... 2... 3... KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby)
•AaAaAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity
•Amnesia: The Dark Descent
•AudioSurf
•BIT.TRIP BEAT
•Cogs
•Defense Grid: The Awakening
•Killing Floor
•RUSH
•Super Meat Boy
•The Ball
•The Wonderful End of the World
•Toki Tori
 
I really think this is pretty much BS. Trying to milk as much out of PC gamers as possible. Valve is already incredibly profitable...I guess they can never have enough.
 
Have you already gotten all the potatoes in those three games?

What does this mean? Did all of the potato-pack games actually have extra content added that needs to be found? Did you have to buy the games specifically along with the pack to get this content added?? I have 7 of the games already, and I'll definitely fire them all up in succession when I get home tonight, but I'm not about to buy any more stuff just for this made-up contest. And if I have to go hunting for hidden potato's in all the games I have, that sounds like it could have a prohibitively long time-delay...

I'm hoping the unemployed do most the work for me while I'm grinding away at work.

This. Come on people who are off work today! You can do it! ;)
 
I think it is brilliant marketing, both for portal 2 and for the pack of indie games. Most of those indie games are all pretty good as well. Even if no one bought the indie pack we would not lose anything, we would just get portal 2 at the same time as everyone else.
 
So is the early release only going to be for Steam? I pre-ordered (the PC version) at GameStop because I happened to be there already and it was 10% off. Oh well...I'll wait for it either way. I've got a bunch of work to do this weekend anyway. :mad:
 
On the plus side anyone that waited was actually able to play their games right afterwards. Steam ground to a complete halt when OB launched.

Ya, I was there for the OB launch day. I had to wait til the day after the next day to play. Course, that's cause I was on the other side of the world when it came out (Korea).
 
I really think this is pretty much BS. Trying to milk as much out of PC gamers as possible. Valve is already incredibly profitable...I guess they can never have enough.

This is helping indie devs. Notice how all of the games in the Potato sack are indie? Yeah.
 
I'm pretty sure Steam gets some of those profits from sales of indie games. Not to mention, by selling more, the indie devs might be more inclined to keep selling their wares on Steam. Hell, I'm surprised they don't just jump ship and start making games for Android or iPad.
 
I'm pretty sure Steam gets some of those profits from sales of indie games. Not to mention, by selling more, the indie devs might be more inclined to keep selling their wares on Steam. Hell, I'm surprised they don't just jump ship and start making games for Android or iPad.

Last I heard the Android market sucks still and even ignoring that the mobile game market simply wouldn't work for some of these games. Or the developers would just rather make PC titles.
 
This is helping indie devs. Notice how all of the games in the Potato sack are indie? Yeah.
Pretty much. While Valve stands to profit as the distributor, I'm sure it's a drop in the bucket for them while on the other hand this could be a big boon for the indie devs.

Maybe I'll load up Audiosurf a little tonight, but that's all I got.
 
focus on "The Wonderful End of the World" since it's over halfway done

What do you mean, over half-way? Looks more like about 12-15% to me (unless it spiked earlier and I missed it). That game is way out in the lead though right now, which seems kindof weird to me... I hadn't even heard of this game 'till today.


It is starting to look like what they want is for 100% of the people who own any given game to be playing it at the same time. See how 1700 users ≈ 12% on Wonderful End of World, while 4500 cpu's are only like 2% of Killing Floor. Doesn't really look like it will help for everyone to go out and buy the potato-pack, 'cause that will just continue to skew the numbers. It will really just require an unusually high percentage of Steam users to be watching that page and jumping to certain games as they go up.

Also, the scores do not seem to be cumulative (most of them are constantly going up and down), so it's really just going to require a lot of luck to get everyone on the right game at the right time. I'm starting to think the odds of this unlocking anything before next Tuesday are pretty slim. Hopefully I'm wrong.
 
People over on the Steam forums are alleging this is simply a marketing ploy and there is no way for the game to actually be released early. There was the golden wrench thing with the TF2 update that also turned out to be impossible to have released early.

If it turns out that there was no chance of Portal 2 ever being released early, people will be rioting in the proverbial streets if they bought into this. It appears from the site that you need to have X number of people currently playing one of the games. Judging by where the progress bar is, unless this becomes cumulative, it appears impossible.
 
People over on the Steam forums are alleging this is simply a marketing ploy and there is no way for the game to actually be released early. There was the golden wrench thing with the TF2 update that also turned out to be impossible to have released early.

If it turns out that there was no chance of Portal 2 ever being released early, people will be rioting in the proverbial streets if they bought into this. It appears from the site that you need to have X number of people currently playing one of the games. Judging by where the progress bar is, unless this becomes cumulative, it appears impossible.
Wow. Concurrent would be pretty much near impossible to rally together in just a couple of days.
 
Wow. Concurrent would be pretty much near impossible to rally together in just a couple of days.

The total progress bar has about 100 bars. After about 5 hours, we'll only be slightly above 5 bars. At the current pace, it will be unlocked at best 5 hours earlier than the initial launch, give or take 10 hours due to precision errors.

Although, I'm guessing Valve will early release it late Sunday night regardless, and people will be jumping with joy, not paying attention to this is just another marketing trick to get gullible people to spend money on games they probably won't play.
 
No way is it going to get released early......

I went to this site: http://www.timeanddate.com/date/timeadd.html

Set it to today's date and time and added the time remaining on the glados@home screen...

Guess what - got Tuesday at 7 am. Go figure.

What people are trying to figure out is if that time remaining number will go down in the event they fill one of those bars. If that's the case, it might be released early, assuming it is physically possibe to fill one.
 
What people are trying to figure out is if that time remaining number will go down in the event they fill one of those bars. If that's the case, it might be released early, assuming it is physically possibe to fill one.

How is this difficult to figure out? At 11 am EST, the timer was 95 hours. At this moment (5 hours later), it stands at slightly below 90 hours. It matches the progress bar almost perfectly. Also, at 11 am, there were ~78k users. Now it stands at ~144k.

Assuming the clock perfectly matched my system time, at the very best, in those 5 hours, 3 seconds were shaved off.

This really isn't rocket science nor brain surgery, despite what many Steam Users would love to believe. It's a marketing gimmick, pure and simple.
 
How is this difficult to figure out? At 11 am EST, the timer was 95 hours. At this moment (5 hours later), it stands at slightly below 90 hours. It matches the progress bar almost perfectly. Also, at 11 am, there were ~78k users. Now it stands at ~144k.

Assuming the clock perfectly matched my system time, at the very best, in those 5 hours, 3 seconds were shaved off.

This really isn't rocket science nor brain surgery, despite what many Steam Users would love to believe. It's a marketing gimmick, pure and simple.

That's not how it (apparently) works.

You are assuming the overall progress bar correlates directly to the progress bars for the individual games, and does so regardless of whether they are completed or not. The theory is that once enough people play those listed games and the invididual progress bars on the games fill up, the overall progress bar will increase and the time remaining will reduce.

No one can prove that one way or the other, but your way makes less sense than that. In any event, though I don't agree with your reasoning, I still think it's a marketing ploy, and people will be pissed. I assume Valve will cave and release it on Sunday or Monday because the forums will be ablaze.
 
That's not how it (apparently) works.

You are assuming the overall progress bar correlates directly to the progress bars for the individual games, and does so regardless of whether they are completed or not. The theory is that once enough people play those listed games and the invididual progress bars on the games fill up, the overall progress bar will increase and the time remaining will reduce.

No one can prove that one way or the other, but your way makes less sense than that. In any event, though I don't agree with your reasoning, I still think it's a marketing ploy, and people will be pissed. I assume Valve will cave and release it on Sunday or Monday because the forums will be ablaze.

If no one knows, nor can prove how it works, then what you're talking about is a hypothesis, not theory. I'm basing it off of what we do know for a fact. At 11 AM EST, the estimated time was 95 hours. At 4 PM EST, the estimated time was 90 hours. The percentage the progress bar has moved correlates to this data.

If something changes to disprove the above, so be it. But until someone can prove this is not a marketing ploy to get the gullible and ignorant to purchase games they would otherwise not purchase, I'll stick to known quantities.
 
If no one knows, nor can prove how it works, then what you're talking about is a hypothesis, not theory. I'm basing it off of what we do know for a fact. At 11 AM EST, the estimated time was 95 hours. At 4 PM EST, the estimated time was 90 hours. The percentage the progress bar has moved correlates to this data.

If something changes to disprove the above, so be it. But until someone can prove this is not a marketing ploy to get the gullible and ignorant to purchase games they would otherwise not purchase, I'll stick to known quantities.

Your conclusion is equally flawed. The very top of the page says to play these games to release Portal 2 early. Valve could be outright lying, but I doubt that. Obviously, a logical conclusion upon reading tha page is that the timer is going to reach the "in any event" release date. You jumped to the conclusion that the game is only going to released on time, despite the fact that none of the individual progress bars are filled and the top of the very page says to play them for Portal 2 to be released early.

I'm not defending Valve and I won't be buying the game. They needed to make clear who this was going to work if they wanted to include purchasing games and not just some other ARG releated thing. I am just saying that no one knows right now whether or not it is even possible. It's obviously a marketing ploy--whether or not there is the ability to actually get it released early as Valve claims is the issue.
 
Damn tempted to buy it at $35 but I think I might as well be patient and wait until it gets down to $20 or less. Too busy right now to play :(
 
This potato preloading thing is bullshit. Fuck Valve's marketing department. I wish people wouldn't engage in this stuff and just sat back and waited for it to be released normally.
 
This potato preloading thing is bullshit. Fuck Valve's marketing department. I wish people wouldn't engage in this stuff and just sat back and waited for it to be released normally.

:rolleyes:

So instead of people having fun, playing other games, having a chance to get Portal 2 released early, help Valve increase their customer base, etc., you'd rather no one care? What does it matter to you what others do/how they spend their time?
 
:rolleyes:

So instead of people having fun, playing other games, having a chance to get Portal 2 released early, help Valve increase their customer base, etc., you'd rather no one care? What does it matter to you what others do/how they spend their time?

Because it encourages this kind of asinine marketing gimmickry that Valve does so well and I find irritating. I'd rather people didn't encourage it and the Valve marketing department had their families beaten in front of them.
 
Because it encourages this kind of asinine marketing gimmickry that Valve does so well and I find irritating. I'd rather people didn't encourage it and the Valve marketing department had their families beaten in front of them.
It's not like Valve is calling you or sending people to your door. It's your own fault if you pay attention to it even though it annoys you.

I'm not big into it myself but it affects me in no way and helps indie developers. What's the harm in that...
 
Because it encourages this kind of asinine marketing gimmickry that Valve does so well and I find irritating. I'd rather people didn't encourage it and the Valve marketing department had their families beaten in front of them.

Yes, what a good idea because we all know that if you don't participate Valve won't release the game at all. The bastards. Why don't you pull that stick out of your ass or just go away if you insist on being a crude, violent, humorless dick.
 
Because it encourages this kind of asinine marketing gimmickry that Valve does so well and I find irritating. I'd rather people didn't encourage it and the Valve marketing department had their families beaten in front of them.

It's a pretty fun idea. Why are you so angry, damn man.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top