Valve gives away new edition of Portal to nVidia users

Brian Ambrozy 9 Jan, 2008 at 9:14am ET Article published in Tech

Apparently Steam’s hardware surveys have borne fruit. According to all their research, Valve have discovered that most PC gamers are using nVidia GeForce video cards. Behind closed doors, many a deal are made; and this one ends up meaning free games for nVidia users.

Immediately available by taking the test, nVidia owners are eligible to download Portal: First Slice, a special edition of Portal. As I stare down at my computer running an ATI card, I have no way of telling you what Portal:First Slice is all about, but an educated guess would be that it is a short, short game – perhaps a few levels designed to get people interested enough in the game to buy the whole shebang… Hey, I’m one of those who bought the whole Peggle Deluxe after playing the free “special edition”, so you know how that goes..

My kids are gleefully making fun of me because they both have GeForce cards. Time to go ground them and play Portal: First Slice on their computers….

Comments

9 Jan 2008 ~ 9:16pm fatcat Yea, WTF...why the discrimation Valve?
9 Jan 2008 ~ 9:19pm Sonorous I don't know about you guys, but my HD2900XT came with what was Valve's "Black Box" for free. Included Portal Team Fortress 2, and Half Life 2: Episode 2. Take that nVidia.
9 Jan 2008 ~ 9:27pm Gate28 *hugs his new geforce 8600 gt* i shall share the slice experience to all with worde =p
9 Jan 2008 ~ 9:54pm NiGHTS They did the same with Ati, as was stated above. Good for them to have both sides of the fence want a piece of action.
10 Jan 2008 ~ 12:35am fatcat why cant I have cake AND ice cream?!?
10 Jan 2008 ~ 7:23am Zuntar Ice Cream! Ice cream!!! WHERE IS THE ICE CREAM!!!!

Ehem, Sorry about that.....wifes diet has deprived me of my regular partaking of said yummyness.:(

So is this slice thing worth it if I already have the orangebox?
10 Jan 2008 ~ 5:33pm ste hmmi get

"You already have all these games.
You can access them in the steam 'My Games' list."

i already have the orange box

ste
10 Jan 2008 ~ 5:54pm Linc

NiGHTS wrote:

Good for them to have both sides of the fence want a piece of action.

I would be interested to know whether either or both were sponsored by ATI/Nvidia. I suspect ATI's was, but this sounds like it wasn't by Nvidia.
10 Jan 2008 ~ 8:05pm primesuspect Well I've confirmed it: If you already own Portal, first slice does absolutely nothing. First Slice is just a demo for those who don't own it.
10 Jan 2008 ~ 8:16pm CB Do want moar portal levels!
11 Jan 2008 ~ 1:33am -MBG--De-Sniper Portal First Slice is like over 6gig download good greif. Id never do that on my life.
11 Jan 2008 ~ 3:17am mas0n

=MBG= De Sniper wrote:

Portal First Slice is like over 6gig download good greif. Id never do that on my life.

Welcome to the internet.

Seriously tho, I download 6GB/day on a regular basis. I threw away all my CDs for games registered through Steam and anytime I reinstall I just login and stream all my games to be installed while I'm at work.
11 Jan 2008 ~ 9:58am Thrax

mas0n wrote:

Welcome to the internet.

Seriously tho, I download 6GB/day on a regular basis. I threw away all my CDs for games registered through Steam and anytime I reinstall I just login and stream all my games to be installed while I'm at work.

Word. I love teh internets. Not steam, particularly, but I love teh internetz.
11 Jan 2008 ~ 1:54pm -MBG--De-Sniper We have only 10gigs of download bandwidth with our DSL provider so its kind of hard to download much in a month.
11 Jan 2008 ~ 2:04pm Thrax You're getting the shaft.
11 Jan 2008 ~ 2:14pm Ryder A demo is 6GB download? Portal and TF2 combined weren't 6GB for me...at least I don't think?

EDIT:
My whole Steamapps folder is 7.8GB and that is TF2, Portal, and HL2.

The demo must be the whole game, but with limited functionality???

Color me confused.
11 Jan 2008 ~ 2:45pm primesuspect Since Portal and TF2 are really just HL2 on source, you need all the HL2 assets to play any of the games. a good 4.5gb of that are the source engine assets.
14 Jan 2008 ~ 3:16am bothered

=MBG= De Sniper wrote:

Portal First Slice is like over 6gig download good greif. Id never do that on my life.

Steam download speeds are a joke. I got a game yesterday and for a lot of the time it was down to 4k.
And I'm not alone - http://video-games.elliottback.com/2005/10/31/half-life-2-steam-installation-too-slow/
The last thing I got from Steam also took almost a full day, I'll have to have a serious think before doing that again.
14 Jan 2008 ~ 10:04am CB I'm with you Bothered. I was pretty disappointed last night by steam's downloads. Crazy Joe, Zan, and I were going to play Titan Quest in co-op mode for our Sunday night RPG session. Everyone had it in time, except for Joe, who started downloading it Saturday evening, and still didn't even have half of it downloaded by 6pm on Sunday, so we didn't get to play this week ...

If we'd known that was going to happen, Joe could have just driven 5 minutes to the nearest game store and bought the damn thing. Of course once he paid steam for the game there was no way to say, "I want my money back, so I can just drive to the store and get this game."

Lesson learned: don't order on steam if it's very important to you that you be able to play in the next couple of days.