Koruyo

The fun and time ppl spent playing ns1 alone is worth the money...
if you can't agree... well - there are always the big publishers reselling the same game year after year for 60$ with only minor changes.

"after seeing Alien Swarm and DOTA I'm starting to think that it's more like they didn't know how to get Source to do what they wanted it to."

Sure u can add a lot stuff to another engine, but at some point its better do make your own. Its not the engine alone, they also made developer tools for their engine which you get after a preorder - for free.

Realtime-editing etc. an engine that makes things easier for little dev teams => Indy developers.

@erode
That is wrong.
Before the start of the closed beta already min. 17.000+ ppl made a pre-order. (This number is a half year old, 90% of all preorders bought the special edition which is no longer available)

@Chazzr it will be released no matter what.

YESTERDAY A NEW PATCH CAME OUT
- 100% SMOOTH GAMEPLAY (for most ppl), no server crashes anymore, lots of "i love you posts" in the official forums