Ironworks Gaming Forum - Valve and Vivendi settle their court case.......Bugger.....

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- - Valve and Vivendi settle their court case.......Bugger..... (http://www.ironworksforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=93508)

Hmm, I was hoping this would go down a bit better, even though I'm not the biggest HL2 fan...

Quote:

Description
Valve and Vivendi have jointly announced the settlement of a pending federal court lawsuit filed by Valve in August 2002. Without quoting much of the legal jargon used, the settlement provides for a complete severing of the publisher/developer link which had existed between these two companies, effective August 31, 2005. At that date, Vivendi will cease to distribute Valve’s games, including Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source.

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.

With this settlement, Valve has probably become the first game developer to function completely independent of a publisher. From late August the only way to obtain a Valve game will be through Steam and although most Half-Life 2 owners will have some (completely justified) complaint regarding the service, I am sure most will agree that this is a significant moment in the history of gaming.

Valve has read the market and decided that since services such as XBox Live, the soon to be available Phantom and Turner's new gaming delivery system are perfectly capable of delivering video game content, it would have to do the same. Steam may not be perfect but the experience Valve gained from the Half-Life 2 launch will serve it well in the coming years.

What we all agree on is that if the middle-man is to be eliminated and if we are to experience a revolution in the gaming industry we will no longer be able to accept the same pricing. Starting with Valve's games for example, we have to see drops since we are sure that the staff and resources of VU Games must have added to the price and that now Valve can begin selling their excellent product for a much more, consumer-friendly price.

If this settlement between Valve and Vivendi is to bring about a revolution it had better be one that gets rid of excess baggage and ends up making the final product much more widely accessible.

<span style="color: lightblue">In other words,
- All the money spent on their games will go to the people who designed and wrote it, not the people who just put it on shelves and advertise it.
- Valve are making use of the internet as a way of distributing software, and will be the first big-name game authors to do so.
- Videndi will loose some business.

Good.

EDIT: Fixed colours...

[ 05-01-2005, 09:18 PM: Message edited by: LennonCook ]

i can see proces not dropping, they gotta pay the lawyers with something

Yeah, there is no way they will drop the price.
And lennon, I doubt you will be liking it so much when you monthly bandwidth is destroyed after buying a game ;)

Quote:

Originally posted by Hivetyrant:
Yeah, there is no way they will drop the price.
And lennon, I doubt you will be liking it so much when you monthly bandwidth is destroyed after buying a game ;)

<span style="color: lightblue">That is the fault of the ISP, not the game designer. The fact is simply that the internet is a wonderful way to distribute games. Cheap, effective, fast. The distributors can basically guarantee that every copy that is downloaded is atleast tried, and - if they license with the internet in mind - possibly tried by multiple people; which they can't do with CDs - they can burn 100000 CDs, but they have no way of guaranteeing that all of those will be bought, or on the flip side that that is enough. As a consumer, I can't go down to Games Wizard and guarantee they'll have the game I want. The internet fixes that - the distributors put up a few servers (and, if they're smart, BitTorrent it), I can simply go to their website, pay their fee, and I've got the game. Every time. Guaranteed (since they should be able to tell if I didn't get the full file, and my account should thus stay open until I do).
The only part where it falls down is with the ISP. If they time limit me, I might not be able to get the game for a month. If they bandwidth limit me, I might not be able to get the game for a month (or, I might not be able to get anything else for a month). But that isn't something anyone but the ISPs can directly control, and it's not something ignoring it will fix. What the ISPs who do this need is a good kick in the pants. Something to start a mass exodus of the average consumer away from them, into the realms of those ISPs who aren't so evil.
With luck, Valve's move will be the start of that something.

Quote:

Originally posted by LennonCook:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Hivetyrant:
Yeah, there is no way they will drop the price.
And lennon, I doubt you will be liking it so much when you monthly bandwidth is destroyed after buying a game ;)

Downloading an entire game seem like a cumbersome way of obtaining a game, especially for non-internetwizzies.

I expect we'll see these online distributers providing snail mail distributions (dvd's) for users with limited bandwidth.

As for me, I think they've got a solid marketing plan, and I think it'll work.

The HL2 release certainly wasn't perfect, but for the first application of their technology they picked a game that was sure to be huge, therefore exacerbating their problems. IMO the whole thing went AMAZINGLY smoothly given the scale and newness.

This is the future of interactive content delivery.

So how many weeks will that take me at 3.5KB/sec? [img]tongue.gif[/img] In ten years maybe, this is just ridiculous!

Who pays for the shipping of sending it over here? In the end it might turn out more expensive than just buying it over the counter.