AppleInsider Comic: Steve Jobs and Gabe Newell talk Half-Life 2

Apple recently met with Valve Software to discuss porting Valve's Half-Life 2 gaming title to the Mac. The two parties failed to reach an agreement, however, as Valve co-founder Gabe Newell reportedly demanded a whopping $1 million advance just to get started. Our Joel Watson takes a behind-the-scenes look at how the negotiations between Newell and Steve Jobs may have played out in this week's AppleInsider comic.

Joel Watson is the creator of the webcomic, HijiNKS Ensue. He'll be crafting new AppleInsider comics on a regular basis and welcomes your suggestions and comments at [email protected].

Last week's AppleInsider comic touched on the whole iPhone hacking/third-party application mess.

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49 Comments

tbaggins

said about 16 years ago

LOL, good comic... though I think they kinda made Steve look a bit strange and cross-eyed. \

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creb

said about 16 years ago

I don't believe Jobs has that much hair on his head any longer.

maestro64

said about 16 years ago

Quote:

Originally Posted by CREB

I don't believe Jobs has that much hair on his head any longer.

I agree, I think the head and facial hair growth should be about the same

polvadis

said about 16 years ago

In regards to the actual One Milllllion Dollars; I don't think that's much to ask for. Considering the popularity of Half-Life I'm sure they will sell well over a million copies for at least $35 bucks or more, that's at least $35 million right there. Not to mention that Apple itself has a pretty good history on shady business practices. So why are they so surprised when it's thrown back at them?

tbaggins

said about 16 years ago

Quote:

Originally Posted by polvadis

In regards to the actual One Milllllion Dollars; I don't think that's much to ask for. Considering the popularity of Half-Life I'm sure they will sell well over a million copies for at least $35 bucks or more, that's at least $35 million right there. No to mention that Apple itself has a pretty good history on shady business practices. So why are they so surprised when it's thrown back at them?

A million copies sold on the Mac side is a stretch. It sold 4-5 million copies on the PC side. There's maybe 5% as many Macs out there as there are PCs, and unfortunately a fair amount of those Macs have crappy integrated graphics, with no opportunity to upgrade, i.e. they wouldn't be able to run Half-Life 2, or wouldn't be able to run it well. \

So, you do the math. It wouldn't sell anywhere near a million copies on the Mac, though its possible it could still sell well enough to warrant the $1 million dollars.

One thing I'd like to add though is that $1 million dollars isn't really that much money in terms of game budgets anymore. There are games out there with $20-30 million dollar budgets now, after all.

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