Half-Life is $2 on Steam at the time of writing. That’s $2 in 2025 money – a far cry from the 1998 money we had when the game came out. It’s difficult to even buy Half-Life at full price nowadays, and Valve has given it the full 100% discount during several events. Valve certainly seems to not be worried about Half-Life sales anymore. But when the game was new and the company was unsteady, and putting all its eggs in a basket with a handsome beard and suit, it was very worried about Half-Life sales, hence its insistence on piracy-fighting authentication.
Founding Valve CMO Monica Harrington shared a detailed account of her history with the company at a Game Developer’s Conference 2025 lecture attended by GamesRadar+, building on her Medium post from last year (which remains essential reading). The whole story – which stresses not just Harrington’s role in developing the company’s foundation and securing a visible space for Half-Life, but also the contributions of a lot of “smart men and smart women” who can go unsung – is worth a look, but one amusing and now-expanded anecdote about piracy stood out to me. It’s a tale as old as time.
“At the time, consumer-level piracy was just becoming a real issue,” Harrington recalled. “My own nephew had just used a $500 check I’d sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator, so he sent me a lovely thank you note essentially saying how happy he was to copy and share games with his friends. I knew he wasn’t a bad kid, but there’d been this generational shift, plus the new replicator technology. 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.”
Bear in mind, this apparent technical hiccup came at a time when Valve had already agonized over the decision to gut Half-Life and quietly start over because the initial version “just wasn’t fun enough,” per Harrington, and fought desperately to get its foot in the door of games as a fledgling company that was also trying to recruit and retain staff. If the game really didn’t work, as these angry gamers insisted, that would be a serious, potentially critical problem for the game’s launch. Luckily for Valve, it just didn’t work if you didn’t buy it, which was kind of the whole point.
Here’s another nugget of GDC knowledge: Blizzard came up with Diablo 4’s most powerful item modifiers at the last minute: “Literally, we had 2 weeks left in the development schedule.”
