Valve Games No Longer In Stores

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2005-04-29 12:34pm

Stolen from PlanetHL

Vavle Press Release wrote: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-Strike™, 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.

I for one am pleased by this. These are the guys who made the game, they should be the ones getting painfully weathly, not some publishing house. I know people on dialup will complain bittery, but even you guys had enough time to get all of HL2 onto your PCs before it's release, despite your painfully slow rates. So, kudos to Valve, may others follow in your footsteps, I love being able to just hit the steam button and kill things. These CDs are just too easy to lose!

DPDarkPrimus · Post by **DPDarkPrimus** » 2005-04-29 02:20pm

Get your copies of Blue Shift while you can, folks.

Shinova · Post by **Shinova** » 2005-04-29 02:51pm

Well, there it is, all Steam now.

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2005-04-29 03:21pm

Congrats to Valve. Now they should focus on getting Steam to run better, take up less memory, etc.

DPDarkPrimus · Post by **DPDarkPrimus** » 2005-04-29 03:29pm

The big question now is- whose's the distributor for X-Box HL2?

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2005-04-29 03:30pm

DPDarkPrimus wrote:Get your copies of Blue Shift while you can, folks.

You cannot get Blue Shift through steam...

Sorta sucks, I love blue shift.

DPDarkPrimus · Post by **DPDarkPrimus** » 2005-04-29 04:41pm

Faram wrote:
DPDarkPrimus wrote:Get your copies of Blue Shift while you can, folks.
You cannot get Blue Shift through steam...

Sorta sucks, I love blue shift.

That's why I own it. You get Opposing Force with it at the same time, there's no reason not to buy it.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2005-04-29 04:56pm

Steam. Okay, so not only do I have to suck my bandwidth to download the game, instead of just tossing in an CD and going, but I have to deal with marginal software, horrible server-end support for new-game releases, and the need to redownload if I ever want to uninstall and reinstall later (space reasons, perhaps?). Uh...screw that, give me my discs, they go into my binder, and online disibution can piss off.

Companion Cube · Post by **Companion Cube** » 2005-04-29 05:29pm

According to what I've read, Activision will be picking up the publishing role. The following comes from one of the admins on Halflife2.net, so I assume it's legit.

Pi Mu Rho wrote: Valve announced a while back that Activision would be publishing their future titles.

Steam notwithstanding, Valve still need a publisher. A large percentage (I'd even go so far as to the majority of HL2 sales came from retail). Someone has to handle that. Someone has to deal with the publicity, promotion and advertising (who do you think paid for those TV spots?).
A developer isn't geared up to deal with all that. They'd be a publisher if they were.

With luck, Steam is going to act as the great leveller - redefining the relationship between developer and publisher. The developer writes the game, the publisher publishes it. The profits should be far more evenly divided, not 90/10 (if you're lucky) in favour of the publisher.

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2005-04-29 05:31pm

White Haven wrote:Steam. Okay, so not only do I have to suck my bandwidth to download the game, instead of just tossing in an CD and going, but I have to deal with marginal software, horrible server-end support for new-game releases, and the need to redownload if I ever want to uninstall and reinstall later (space reasons, perhaps?). Uh...screw that, give me my discs, they go into my binder, and online disibution can piss off.

I don't see why anyone would prefer a cd over downloading. It's annoying enough to swap cds when I want to play Farcry or Doom 3. If Steam wasn't coded like a piece of shit then I wouldn't have a problem with it.

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2005-04-29 05:38pm

Partially for the same reason that people prefer to buy books over PDFs.

When people buy and own things, they often like it to be in the physical sense, too.

2000AD · Post by **2000AD** » 2005-04-29 06:33pm

I guess that's what really annoyed me about Half Life 2. I went out and bought the game as soon as it was in shops and yet i had to wait for hours after i installed it because Steam was a pile of crap.

I had the game, i had it installed and it's all legit. Why the fuck was i not being allowed to play the game i have waited over 5 years for and paid over £30 for!

That's why i like CD's/DVD's over downloading. If HL2 hadn't have been up for download would we still have had to go through all that shit with steam?

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2005-04-29 06:40pm

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:Partially for the same reason that people prefer to buy books over PDFs.

When people buy and own things, they often like it to be in the physical sense, too.

Aye. While I have read fanfiction and novels on my PDA like War of the Worlds which was free online, it doesn't feel right. Sure it's smaller and self-illuminated, but I prefer having a hard copy like a decent book.

Post by **weemadando** » 2005-04-29 08:04pm

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:Partially for the same reason that people prefer to buy books over PDFs.

When people buy and own things, they often like it to be in the physical sense, too.

[Groucho]Bingo - give that man a cigar...[/Groucho]

And the fact that I have to deal with painfully slow dial-up getting stuff from servers IN THE US that are already horrifically over-loaded... Fuck that. Valve - my initial Half-Life 2 debacle was bad enough. With this, you've just lost a customer entirely.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2005-04-29 08:07pm

Does this mean Aftermath will be solely on Steam? If so, I doubt I'd be able to get it. Dial-up to download a few hundred megs is bad enough. If it's over a gig, forget it.

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2005-04-29 08:14pm

Damn, Valve could easily lose at least half of their customers with this, just from the whole dial-up issue alone.

Shinova · Post by **Shinova** » 2005-04-29 09:30pm

Though, in a sense, a computer game and a book are a bit different.

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2005-04-29 09:36pm

Shinova wrote:Though, in a sense, a computer game and a book are a bit different.

And in a sense, they're the same. You can't change the fact that people prefer to own physical objects rather than just pure data.

Executor32 · Post by **Executor32** » 2005-04-29 09:44pm

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:Damn, Valve could easily lose at least half of their customers with this, just from the whole dial-up issue alone.

Did you miss the fact that Activision is now Valve's retail publisher?

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2005-04-29 09:50pm

This is very cool news. Lets hope Activision spends more on jewl cases and manuals then VU did.

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2005-04-29 09:54pm

Executor32 wrote:
Spanky The Dolphin wrote:Damn, Valve could easily lose at least half of their customers with this, just from the whole dial-up issue alone.
Did you miss the fact that Activision is now Valve's retail publisher?

Um, yes...