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 counterclaims. Under the settlement agreement, VU Games will cease distribution of retail packaged versions of Valve's games, including Half-Life®, Half-Life 2, Counter-StrikeTM, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source, effective August 31, 2005.
Additionally, VU Games has notified distributors and cyber cafes 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.
So no more HL2 retail after Aug. 31, 2005!! That is a huge blow to VUs profits.
Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative the same night
It probably also means no DoD or any significant add-ons until then either.
" Hey OP, listen to my advice alright." -Tha General "“I like taking the guns early...to go to court would have taken a long time. So you could do exactly what you’re saying, but take the guns first, go through due process second.” -President Donald Trump. "...To guard, protect, and maintain his liberty, the freedman should have the ballot; that the liberties of the American people were dependent upon the Ballot-box, the Jury-box, and the Cartridge-box, that without these no class of people could live and flourish in this country." - Frederick Douglass MYT
this is a bit of a blow to the cafe's. they lose the rights to host those games and may be out a bit of money if valve doesn't offer them some kind of usage rights transfer. even then, how happy would anyone be at having to re-license the game they already paid for?
Caine wrote:this is a bit of a blow to the cafe's. they lose the rights to host those games and may be out a bit of money if valve doesn't offer them some kind of usage rights transfer. even then, how happy would anyone be at having to re-license the game they already paid for?
Next up....cyber cafes sue Vivendi for breach of contract.
In my experience, Valve has been pretty good to its customers. Now that they've won and don't have to push their points anymore, I wouldn't be surprised if places with existing contracts were given solid treatment.
My feeling is Valve was pretty crappy to their customers by forcing steam on them. All other games that I've bought via VU haven't giving me a fraction of the problems that Valve's steam based products have.
So will Valve strictly be a self publisher now? More power to them! I like to see the developers get all the money. I know steam has caused a fair amount of people some serious problems but it never gave me any.
Interesting. What does this mean for the Half Life 2 expansion? No retail distribution?
I'm not so sure that I would buy something through Steam. I didn't like the concept. It actually prevented me from using the high def packs for the original half life when playing through Steam. There was some workaroud for it but it was troublesome. I ended up just installing directly from the disks and played without the interference of Steam.
"The old lady told me that all the girls in the village of Annezin prayed every night for the War to end, and for the English to go away - as soon as their money was spent. And that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it." Robert Graves
