Since we were all led to believe you could preload the content, enter your key, let it authenticate and go, many people in Europe din't see it necessary to buy a DVD drive. The thing is, in Europe, there was only the DVD version. Click to expand.How long ago did you buy HL2? Because there actually was a CD-in-the-drive requirement for a little while (lik 2-3-ish weeks) until Valve got to it and finally released a no-cd patch.