Saw this on PlanetFortress, figured I'd pass it on over here. Looks like some good news for a change!
Erik Johnson, Project Manager of Valve Software, issued the following statement to the Half-Life Dedicated Servers List in response to the PunkBuster Team announcing their drop of support for Half-Life (story). Noting that it is "time well spent" Erik states Valve has and will continue to support all 3rd party development that keeps Half-Life successful.
PunkBuster just updated their news a few mins ago, here is what they said:
Erik Johnson, Project Manager of Valve Software, issued the following statement to the Half-Life Dedicated Servers List in response to the PunkBuster Team announcing their drop of support for Half-Life (story). Noting that it is "time well spent" Erik states Valve has and will continue to support all 3rd party development that keeps Half-Life successful.
We're coming up on the third year of Half-Life development, and it's been a pretty fun first three years. We don't have any plans to stop supporting our existing customers, mod makers, or server admins. It's pretty obvious that much of Half-Life's success is due to third party development, and it's for that reason that we spend so much time supporting them.Update:
We think it's great the PunkBuster team has championed the effort to combat cheating in Half-Life. Working together with the whole Half-Life community on any kind of cheat prevention software just seems like time well spent. The more people that take up the cause to combat cheating, and the more Valve can do to support those people, the better off all of our customers and server admins are.
With that in mind, rest assured that we've talked to the PunkBuster team and we're going to see if there is a way to move the Half-Life engine toward being more friendly to these kinds of third party anti-cheat applications.
Erik
PunkBuster just updated their news a few mins ago, here is what they said:
Since Tuesday's announcement regarding PunkBuster going commercial, we have received four inquiries from commercial game developers (including Valve) about the possibility of integrating our Anti-Cheat software technology into their products. We continue to desire relationships with game designers who are serious about stopping cheaters. We will release more details as soon as possible (hopefully, in the near future).