As everyone probably knows Valve has mentioned a few times that they are going to be putting quite a bit of effort in to anti-cheating measures. It looks like it wont be through cooperation with the Punkbuster guys though, Valve must be working on their own thing right now. A while back Punkbuster came on to the scene as an external program that actually helped to detect cheats. (As well as randomly boot people who didnt have any cheats, argh!) and there was a brief moment of bliss knowing that if Punkbuster was loaded, you didnt have to worry about cheats. However for a long time now cheaters have been able to circumvent Punkbuster's cheat protection with relative ease. Well it looks like Punkbuster wont be a part of the equation any longer in this obviously bitter note:

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.

Wha? "...did not want to charge users directly for our product". I dont get it, isnt Valve putting out all of these patches for free too? I think it was intended as a jab at Valve but I cant be sure because it doesnt make any sense. Thanks L0wBall note: We've switch comment systems today, to see the earlier comments on this story go here.

update: Looks like the conclusion most people are drawing is that the Punkbuster guys requested that Valve integrate PB in to Half-Life and pay the PB staff to do that work. Apparently Valve is opting to do their own stuff instead and declined the PB offer.