HL2and all steam games to be withdrawn form in store sle

[alterion]

Valve and Vivendi Universal Games Settle Lawsuit
April 29, 2005, 9:47 am · Chris Bokitch
Bellevue, WA and Los Angeles, CA - April 29, 2005 -- Valve and Vivendi Universal Games (VU Games) today announced the settlement of a pending federal court lawsuit filed by Valve in August 2002. The parties have resolved their differences, and the settlement provides for the dismissal of all claims and coaunterclaims. Under the settlement agreement, VU Games will cease distribution of retail packaged versions of Valve's games, including Half-Life®, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike™, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source, effective August 31, 2005.

Additionally, VU Games has notified distributors and cyber cafés that were licensed by VU Games that only Valve is authorized to distribute Valve games to cyber cafés and grant cyber café licenses. Cyber café operators that were licensed by VU Games have also been notified that any license agreement from Sierra Entertainment, Vivendi Universal Games or any of their affiliates or distributors that may have granted rights to use Valve games in cyber cafés, whether written or oral, is terminated.

About Valve
Based in Bellevue, Washington, Valve is an entertainment software and technology company founded in 1996. Valve's debut title, Half-Life, has won over 50 Game of the Year Awards and named "Best PC Game Ever" in the November 1999, October 2001, and April 2005 issues of PC Gamer, the world's best-selling PC games magazine. Valve's portfolio of entertainment titles also includes Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat™, and Team Fortress® and accounts for over 15 million retail units sold worldwide, and over 88% of the PC online action market. Information about Valve's Cyber Café Program can be found at www.steampowered.com.

Vivendi Universal Games (VU Games)
Vivendi Universal Games (www.vugames.com) is a global developer, publisher and distributor of multi-platform interactive entertainment. The company is a leader in the subscription-based massively multi-player online (MMO) games category, and also holds leading positions in the PC, console and handheld games markets. Its development studios and publishing labels include Blizzard Entertainment®, Radical Entertainment™, Sierra® Entertainment and Massive Entertainment™. VU Games' library of over 700 titles features owned intellectual properties including Warcraft®, StarCraft®, Diablo® and World of Warcraft® from Blizzard; Crash Bandicoot®, Spyro The Dragon™, Empire Earth®, Leisure Suit Larry™, Ground Control® and Tribes®. VU Games also maintains strategic relationships with industry leading content partners, including NBC Universal and Twentieth Century Fox.
worthy of a frontpage if i ever saw one.. what impact will this have upon gaming?

[directhex]

interesting

sorta screws modem owners a bit, but they have bigger things to worry about - like still using a modem!

[iMc]

They will probably find another publisher... I'm sure plenty will be interested.

[Trippledence]

I dont see any point in not relesing it in stores. Its only Valve who will lose out at the end of the day.

[Ferral]

I can understand the online activation. It was their effort to stop piracy of a huge title, however it is not fair on people that dont have the net as they cant play it at all. I didnt have the net when I first bought it due to recently moving home so it sat there for around 3 weeks and couldnt be played.

I'm not sure if another supplier would really want to accept valve now after all this and what I mentioned previously. I called Sierras head office and spoke to someone there that deals with complaints a few days after HL2 was released, really helpful and nice guy (Sierra have always been a decent company in my eyes and always will, pretty good help from them in the past when I have encountered problems) he was really helpful and said if I sent the game into him he would give me a full refund on it no questions asked at all. At the time he did say to me that Valve would not be releasing anything else through them as this copy protection / online activation only was implemented last minute by Valve without them knowing about it at an earlier date.

I think good on Sierra, hope they continue to get some decent titles coming our way. As for Valve, well I think you can see my thoughts on that one. They should think about the little people out there that want to play their titles and find a way round things like this in the future to keep everyone happy.

[DavidM]

I can't blame Valve for wanting to stop piracy... and it seems to have worked pretty well for them.

[Ferral]

Not at all, its good they are really trying. But there was still pirate copies of HL2 flitting about hours after it was released, its one of those catch 22 situations. Thing that really got me was having to do the online activation when I didnt have a net connection at the time so my brand new game just sat there for a few weeks while I got my net sorted, I wont have been the only person to be affected by this. They should have done some sort of alternative registration method to help people that are in the no net connection predicament instead of just doing it the way they did.

[DavidM]

Agreed - perhaps a telephone registration as well?

[Ferral]

Yeah, that could have been done, something like you put the serial number in then you are given a reference number, call a dedicated line and put the ref number in then you are given an automated code you then put into the game to make it go.

Something like that could have quite easily been implemented to help people out, instead they just upset quite a few with the online only activation.

[Spud1]

The online activation doesnt work, was easily pirated days after release - it didnt take long for a group to come up with a steam emulator and server crack so pirates can play HL2, CSS, TFC etc

The problem is that some of the best coders, reverse engineers and crackers 'work' for these groups. No matter what the game or application producer does they WILL find a way round it - even if it means re-writing portions of game code (eg with the famous F.A.D.E protection that needed a few dlls re-doing at first, until it was found how to disable it from the main exe)

tbh i think that they should stop wasting money on 'advanced' copy protection and spend that money on making better games. Simple 'off the shelf' systems like securom or safedisk might not stop the real pirates, but they are cheap and will stop 'Joe Bloggs i'm a 13370r cos i can use p2p' from copying it

Rumours are flying around that activison will be their next publisher, valve always wanted to switch to them but were stuck with VU.

[Kezzer]

To put a long story short;

Valve beat Vivendi
Valve tells Vivendi to foxtrot oscar with HL2 sales
Valve take the download route only

[SilentDeath]

The online activation doesnt work, was easily pirated days after release - it didnt take long for a group to come up with a steam emulator and server crack so pirates can play HL2, CSS, TFC etc

The problem is that some of the best coders, reverse engineers and crackers 'work' for these groups. No matter what the game or application producer does they WILL find a way round it - even if it means re-writing portions of game code (eg with the famous F.A.D.E protection that needed a few dlls re-doing at first, until it was found how to disable it from the main exe)

tbh i think that they should stop wasting money on 'advanced' copy protection and spend that money on making better games. Simple 'off the shelf' systems like securom or safedisk might not stop the real pirates, but they are cheap and will stop 'Joe Bloggs i'm a 13370r cos i can use p2p' from copying it

Rumours are flying around that activison will be their next publisher, valve always wanted to switch to them but were stuck with VU.

I assume pirated copys can still not be played online.. single player only? might be wrong.. but i didnt think it would be possible to pirate and get it playing online.. cant with most games...?

Sinlge player will always be possible to play with pirate copys if people that know how to do it want to....

As for steam.. I think it could have been done a lot better.. look at how eq2 is done.. much better imo although it is slightly different..

[Spud1]

Cracked servers let pirates play online as with almost all games :S