For you that dont know punkbuster is 3rd party software used to stop cheaters. Any one that plays half-life (Counter-Strike, Team Fortress) knows it has been plagued with cheaters and has lost a lot of players due to this. Well Sierra/Valve have been saying for months they are working to fix these problems, the hole time punkbuster doing this for them for free. Well the latest release of Halflife come out a week ago and to everyones surprise (not realy) Sierra/Valve didnt even fix one of the cheats in the game. I think is a very bad call by Sierra/Valve as cheats will kill a game faster than anything. Read on for the quote from punkbusters webpage
On a sad note to honest players of Counter-Strike and Half-Life mods, we have determined that the current version of PunkBuster cannot be appreciably improved without the direct support of VALVe. We have offered to do business with VALVe on multiple occasions in the way of integrating proven Anti-Cheat technology directly into their games. At this time, we are suspending development of the Half-Life version to focus on game platforms where the developer is willing to support the effort. We sincerely believe that we have had a positive impact on the Half-Life community and we truly appreciate the support of our hundreds of thousands of users. However, from the beginning we have said that we did not want to charge users directly for our product and we intend to abide by that decision. The remaining bugs, problems, issues, etc. with the Half-Life version cannot be addressed properly without direct integration with the game, and at this time, there is no hope of that even being a possibility.