I understand you arguments and agree to a certain extent, although I'm not nearly as much into games as you are, but at least Valve has produced a product that is entertaining. I'm as far as HL2 is concerned, Vivendi is provding them with nothing, AFAIK. I doubt Valve needed cash from them to produce the game, and they probably don't need any promotion for it. Word of mouth is going to be good enough in this case. So I don't see Valve wanting to avoid publishers as a bad thing for them, at least at this time.

But what you're saying, I think, is that other game developers will see what Valve is doing and decide to publish their games by themselves (via whatever technology). I think that most companies realize that that would be a bad idea, as one misstep could, as you describe, close the company for good. (Of course, you could have a separate company for each game, so if it goes bankrupt, you just start another, but that's another story rife with problems.) The real problem, I think, comes in the notion that game publishers will start to wonder where their money's gone. In many cases, game cash cows are sequels. It certainly seems to be the case this year. People were and are clamoring for such games as HL2, Doom 3, Halo 2, etc. And this is where companies make their money. But if a developer becomes big enough to have that much pre-release interest, they could go it on their own. And that leaves publishers' easy money nowhere to be found. Which means that the game publishers might decide that the market is too risky for the reward available.

Of course, none of this touches on the distribution. It's "easy" for PC game developers. Virtually everyone that's going to want to play their games has sizable bandwidth. But what about console games. I suppose it'd be possible for the XBox to download games to its hard drive, but new technology would need to be developed there, and it'd have to get installed somehow. But as for the other systems, you'd still need to buy a physical product. I suppose you could be required to download CD images and burn them. But chances are that you'd really need a physical product. And that means distribution, and, right now, publishers take care of that. What happens if the publishers go away and all of a sudden the game stores have to deal with each individual game developer to get product? That's a nightmare. (For reference, Marvel Comics, easily the larget comics publisher, decided to forego distributors about ten years ago and require stores to buy straight from them, which they did, because that was the ony way they could get it and not carrying Marvel Comics would be a death blow for a comics store. Even with all of that, and the fact that stores still only had to deal with two distrubition entities, their self-distribution scheme fell apart within a year.)

And then there's the casual gamer. Being reqiuired to perform any of the steps above to the casual gamer (downloading massive images and burning CDs,) are probably enough to make them just not bother. And the casual gamer, while not respected in the gaming field, is still a significant portion of sales. Not to mention the fact that while every gamer is going to know about HL2, not ever casual gamer is. (Not that that's a good example, since you'll apparently have to have a separate 4GHz workstation on an AGP card in order to play the thing anyway.) And if they have to download it, how will they even know that it exists? And we're back to promotion, which is something that the developers don't know how to do.

Anyway, I'm not sure what my point is, which is surprising considering I've rambled on for pages and pages. Just more to consider, I guess.