Following the big court fight between VU-Games and Valve, GameSpot reports that Vivendi Universal has the power to delay Half Life 2 release for another 6 months after the final version of the game is done. This is what senior vice president of VU, Eric Roeder, stated on August 27, 2004 in court filings:

Valve has announced that it will deliver a release candidate version of Half-Life 2 (HL2) (a game required under the 2001 SPA) to Sierra/VUG within the next few weeks. If Valve delivers a release candidate version that complies with the contract and is a Final Milestone, then VUG will have six months to release the product under the 2001 SPA. Valve is pressing VUG to release the product early within that six month window, and its representatives have made a number of public statements without our consent or concurrence that the product will be published and released to the general public in September of this year.

Well, it seems that if Valve doesn’t do what Vivendi wants (read here), they will postpone the release of Half Life 2 as much as they can. Like Chuck Palahniuk would say: “Blackmail” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.