Valve are encouraging people to buy and play very decent indie games en masse by promising to release their next big title a few days early if they do?Those evil, indie game supporting bastards!

You don't need to buy anything, you have to play one of the games from the potato pack. If you have been playing along with the ARG you already have at least one, all you have to is launch it and let it run or, you know, play it and enjoy it. If you don't have any of the games from the potato pack that means you were not participating in the ARG and were hoping other people would solve it for you so you could play the game early. So either buck up and participate or keep doing what you were doing and sit there and let other people do your part, you can spend the time you are not playing crying on twitter and in steam forums. It costs 2.49$ for some of those games. If you don't want to pay 3$ to speed up the release date then go do what ever you were going to do until street date in the first place, instead of acting like a bunch of entitled butthurt babies. People act like this is some evil thing and now Valve is turning into Activision and EA. Have either of those companies ever taken the hype over one of their huge releases and turned it into profit for a bunch of small indie developers? Sure they make a little money off the steam purchase but they could have used only Valve games to do this, they didn't have to share with anyone. Im sure selling a bunch of under 10$ games at 50% off is really raking in the dough for Valve too. Whats 30% of a 3 dollars? 90 CENTS!!! per copy!!! jesus valve is probably just gonna shut down after all this money they make.For those of you whining that you bought it from Amazon or gamestop or whatever and this isn't FAIR. First of all you bought it with the release date as 4/19 there are not moving it back if you didn't purchase it steam. Second you have the chance to buy it straight from the developer without any third party making money off you and for some reason you bought it elsewhere? “But I wanted the PS3 and PC copies” oh jeeze you get two copies of the game for the price of one, boo hoo i feel so bad for you. Choose your reward, you want it a couple days early or you want a free second copy? Feels like a pretty fair trade, I bought it on Steam I dont get a ps3 copy. Am I gonna go whining about how Valve is like EA? I also love how people are calling EA evil but went out of their way to give EA money when they could have just bought it on Steam and not funded EA's “evil” coffers.

Re-iterating what was said above, you don't have to buy anything. GLaDOS's power status relates to how many people are playing the same indie game simultaneously. Existing owners just have to run the games they have to help out. So as long as you already have a game in the Potato Sack (which most likely you do) you can help launch Portal 2 earlier.

I think some people just expect too much. I knew there might be some kind of catch, so I'm not terribly angry. Besides, as I post this, we only have 3 1/2 more days to wait, at the most.

It's the second time this happens in parallel with the humble indie bundle run. Is it coincidence? Hmmmmm!

This is retarded. Why is everyone so mad? Who cares? Cry me a river. I'll play Portal 2 on its release date, I'm not flustered about this at all.

VALVE.. are fascists.. the advertisement i participated in for a video game ended up with me having to buy something??? WORSE THAN BUSH!!!

Repeating what those before me have already pointed out. You don't have to buy anything, chances are if you've been engaged at all you already have one of the 13 games, which range in price from 2.49$ to 9.99$ by themselves, or ~39$ together. I personally already had Amnesia from one of the humble bundles. Most people hoped that portal 2 would release today, but there hadn't been any clear evidence pointing to that as the only possibility. Do your research next time.

So we're talking about gamers here… where is the surprise?

Why would I buy a Valve game, they just broke DODS and TF2 with what they call upgrades, upgrades my arse how can breaking a game be called an upgrade? Do I expect the same with Portal 2, hell yes, just give them some time. I will never buy another Valve game period.

The ARG was started by playing one of the games in the “Potato Sack” bundle. 80% of the game so far has required these games. The vocal minority are the ones that purchased Portal 2 and are upset they don't get to play the game as early as they want. Be happy that a company like Valve is kind enough to offer the additional fun & opportunity for people who are already likely committed to buying the game.

Wow, a hell of a lot of overreactions on the internet. I think it's a brilliant bit of marketing: get more people playing indie games, speed the launch of portal 2… why all the anger? If you don't want the game to release before its release date, then don't buy an indie game, simple as that.

Uh, among the gamers I'm following on Twitter, I haven't heard a single negative word. A lot of people already own at least one of those games, so it's no real problem for them to just boot up a game on the list. So use of the word “Uniformly” is a real poor choice. I doubt Mr. Takahashi actually canvased ALL of Twiiter, or else this article would (hopefully) have taken a different tone.

thanks for all the comments. i see the reactions aren't all on one side.

[...] promotion, which has the potential to bring in significant revenue for the game bundle, is being met with tough reactions from many gamers, who feel like it was a bad surprise and was pushing them to buy unwanted games. That’s in [...]

Wow, look at all this uniform negativity. What a spot-on an accurate journalist we have here.

The writer has already made note that the reaction doesn't appear to be as negative as he first thought. No need to criticize him on a point he has already corrected himself on.

THE EARLY LAUNCH DATE WAS A LIE.Seriously Portal fans, GlaDOS played you and you fell for it.Brilliant Valve.