According to this interview with Doug Lombardi of Valve software, all purchasers of Half Life 2 will be required to have a Steam account online and use that to authenticate the software.

This means that :
1> If you do not have internet access, you cannot play Half Life 2.
2> If Valve goes under for any reason, you cannot play Half Life 2.
3> In the future, if you want to play, you will need to authenticate through Steam or you cannot play Half Life 2.

So we need to hope and pray that either Valve and Steam become critical parts of the internet that cannot fail and never go away.

Or we need to pressure Valve to not force this stupid authentication/activation scheme upon buyers of the boxed game.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/23/0812224

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/half-life-2/558931p1.html

Direct all POLITE comments to : lombardi@valvesoftware.com