Valve Wins Summary Judgment Against Vivendi

ShamusMcGee writes "Valve today announced the U.S. Federal District Court in Seattle, WA granted its motion for summary judgment on the matters of Cyber Café Rights and Contractual Limitation of Liability in its copyright infringement suit with Sierra/Vivendi Universal Games." From the judgement: "...based on the undisputed facts and applicable law, Sierra/Vivendi, and their affiliates, are not authorized to distribute (directly or indirectly) Valve games through cyber-cafés to end-users for pay-for-play activities pursuant to the parties' 2001 Agreement."

what does this mean?

[luvbassonacid]

how is this significant? not trolling... rather im encouraging the flow of meaningful conversation :)

Cyber cafes in general

[tod_miller]

Have been causing a stirr, they were actually outlawed in Greece I heard, and then re-instated - too many kids playing games!

I say the distributors could sell licenses to the cafes themselves... this seems to be a funny way of capturing a wierd stake... valve shafted thier publishers, almost making sure they had an escape plan... or thier publishers are greedily holding onto something that isn't thiers.

Publishing will not go away, but become a gift based medium, an 'order nice boxed set (collectors edition) for gifts.

Anyway, In Korea only old people use pay-per-play

Yeehaw

[TychoCelchuuu]

I suspect I will be one of the few people happy about this; most are going to see it as corporate suits fighting for every last penny at the expense of the gamers. Oh well. I'd rather Valve have control over the Cyber Cafes than Vivendi.

Good.

[Pxtl]

Maybe now cafes will have to carry games other than fucking Counterstrike.

How this affects in the long run

[TJ_Phazerhacki]

Most people who would even bother to read this post are well aware of the longstanding issues between publishers and programmers - specifically the catfight between Valve and Vivendi. Well, I for one am glad to see this judgement swing in favor of the Designers. Vivendi obviously overstepped its bounds, and needed to lose this.

Now the real question - How will pubs treat Game Designers in the future? If the pendulum swings too far to the money (Pubs), many smaller designers will never see the light of day - the dominating control they have exerted on them will drive them out of the business. I personally would love to see more systems like Steam - Vivendi is scared stiff of it, and for good reason. The lack of need for physical stores could do to the corporate game model what online shopping has done for some aspects of retail. When they realize selling a CD for 50$ is simply unnaceptable, the cream of the crop will rise, and we will see more, good, and most importantly, new game ideas. No more rehashes, no more annual updates for the sake of pushing product - If you want to make money, you need to make a good game. Period.

Steam + Viviendi = $50, Steam - Viviendi = ??

[Chillybott]

With this lawsuit result, I would imagine that Valve and Viviendi may be going their separate ways in the future. What would this mean for the gamer?

Will Steam allow Valve to pretty much be its own publisher? Think about the fact that Viviendi is a middleman, delivering the packaged game to those of us who bought the actual box and CDs.

Do those of us who purchased via Steam actually seen any benefit at all from Valve's relationship with Viviendi? I don't think so, all we saw was a publishing house dictated price. A price that included overhead costs for box and CD printing (and design etc) that we will never see.

I think it'll be interesting to see if this suit brings Valve to a pub-less distribution method, and if we as gaming consumers will see the cost benefit when the middleman is officially eliminated.

Re:what does this mean?

[realdpk]

?? Community friendly? Have you tried Steam yet? It's about the most unfriendly app I've seen.