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First Person Shooters (Games) Government The Courts Entertainment Games News

Valve Bullying Cybercafes Over Licensing? 162

Posted by simoniker from the eye-of-beholder dept.
The Importance of writes "Yesterday, as mentioned on Slashdot, Valve announced arrests relating to the theft of Half-Life 2 code. Gabe Newell, Valve's CEO, was quoted as saying, 'Everyone here at Valve is once again reminded of how much we owe to the gaming community.' Demonstrating its appreciation of the gaming community, Valve also threatened to sue a cybercafe offering Counter-Strike without the correct licensing. This may sound fair enough, but while companies like Microsoft allow cybercafes the right to offer games as long as they buy each copy of the games they use, Valve has what are generally considered the worst cybercafe licensing terms there are. Moreover, instead of merely sending a cease and desist letter ('knock it off or we will sue'), Valve sent a ' pay us big bucks for a license or we'll sue letter'. In other words, unless the cybercafe prepays for a one-year license starting at the time the letter was received, they will be sued."
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Valve Bullying Cybercafes Over Licensing? More

Valve Bullying Cybercafes Over Licensing?

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  • Bullying? I Think Not. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by illuminata ( 668963 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @07:19AM (#9406046) Journal
    This guy is running a business for Christ's sake. He should have known the score beforehand. The fact that this person is ignoring the legal side of things while running a business is stupid no matter how you look at it.

    Frankly, I don't feel sympathetic for this person at all. They're running a cybercafe; getting the licensing issues out of the way should be top priority for them before they allow the game to be played. That "poor, pitiful me" shit doesn't fly here. If they didn't know the ins and outs of their business before they got in it, they shouldn't be in it now.

    Valve did no wrong here. Hopefully something good will come out of this; Valve will show this person that they should stick to being an employee.

    • Re:Bullying? I Think Not. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dubious9 ( 580994 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @08:09AM (#9406162) Journal
      From the article:

      Should you demonstrate to our satisfaction the number of seats you have been using and presently need licensed and if you enter into a pre-paid, one year commercial license agreement with Valve for that usage, Valve will consider this matter resolved and will not pursue any claims it may have for past infringement of its software products in regard to their use at your establishment.

      The point that they do not simply have the option to stop offering Counter Strike. They have to buy a license if they don't want to get sued. Maybe the guy made a mistake and thought they just by buying 40 copies of half-life and putting them on his computers was enough.

      This was a reasonable position given that:

      ...with companies such as Microsoft offering licenses through cybercafé organizations like iGames such that as long as each copy of a title is legitimately purchased, cybercafés may use them.

      Yes he profited from using Half-life and the free CS mod, and yes he should have made sure that all of the licensing was correct. But as a company with large community of followers, why would you want to seed mistrust as a money-grubbing corporation to some shmuck who didn't know he needed a different license?

      If he wants to keep using CS, then he should get the license, but he should have the opportunity just to stop offering it (if he had accuired the copies legally), as it could have been just an honest mistake.

      Of course there could be more details to this case that shine less favorable on the cafe, but forcing someone to buy a license or risk law-suits doesn't exactly ring as a nice thing to do.

      • Re:Bullying? I Think Not. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12, 2004 @08:45AM (#9406308)
        Furthermore they seem to be cornering him in this fantastically worded acusation:

        As you know, the retail versions of Valve products are not intended for, nor are they licensed for, commercial exploitation (such as use in a cyber café/LAN center). Unauthorized duplication and use of computer software products constitutes copyright infringement.

        If he says that he legitimately bougth separate copies, they can counter that he knew that this was insufficient as they lead off with "As you know...". An a priori acusation, if you will, that carries insinuations both ways. Much like the statement: "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Insinuates you have been beating your wife whether you have or not.

        If he did not buy the copyies they not only nail him with "commericial exploytation" but with copyright infrigement as well. This is important since the commercial exploytation has less legal ground to stand on.

        Las Vegas used to have Super Bowl parties where you paid admission for food&drink to watch the game. Since the NFL saw it as selling tickets to watch the game, they threatened legal action if a licensing agreement wasn't worked out and if they continued. But the NFL didn't threaten to sue unless they bought a agreement. Vegas had two non-lawsuit choices: stop or pay.

        In conclusion, if the cafe owner wasn't acting in bad faith (copyright infrigement) and simply wasn't aware of the restrictions (EULA's have yet to be desively tested in court(IIRC)), it will be hard to successfully sue if he shows that he has stopped using their software.
        • Personally, I don't have a lot of sympathy for people that run a business, but can't be bothered to read things like EULAs. End users know generally what they are entitled to, and business owners usually know that there is a lot more involved. This guy obviously didn't bother to figure out what was a legal use of the product under the terms of sale.

      • Re:Bullying? I Think Not. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by illuminata ( 668963 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @09:22AM (#9406448) Journal
        I don't think that this was necessarily a nice move in business, but it is business; you can't always be nice. This guy might not've known about how to license, but he really should've. If this was, say, a one-time fee-based lan party that some college kids threw and they get this letter, I'd be pissed off with Valve too. In that case being unknowledgeable about licensing schemes could very well be a legitimate excuse. However, we're talking about a place that is out to sustain profit and operates regularly. A place that should have known better.

        I think that the bigger question, the one that Valve is probably asking, is: How could they not know?

        If this person truly didn't know, they should've went to Valve first and try to work something out regardless of what stated in the letter. If Valve acted like a jerk in response then you could let it go to court and hope for leniency there. But this should be a very important lesson to them; know what you're doing first.

        I'm guessing that Valve doesn't see this guy as some schmuck. His site design [battlegroundpcgaming.com] might make you think so but check out the pictures [battlegroundpcgaming.com] as well. He seems to have a good handle on that end. When it comes to something like a gaming center, it's not unreasonable at all to expect that they have their licensing issues settled before allowing the game to be played. If they knew enough to get a T1 line (as stated on their site), set up a lan, and run a for-profit business, making sure that you can do so legally isn't too much of an expectation. Valve probably felt that this was a glaring enough issue that a reasonable business would know to have it settled beforehand either by their own good sense or by a lawyer's. And, therefore, not taking care of the issue could only be in bad faith (yes, I read the AC's response to your post).

        If this person was truly stupid enough to not find out that he needed a special license beforehand, than anybody remotely close to him, anybody who has an ounce of compassion for him, should force him to close up immediately. I just don't buy that he's that stupid when he's in the business already.
        • If this person was truly stupid enough to not find out that he needed a special license beforehand, than anybody remotely close to him, anybody who has an ounce of compassion for him, should force him to close up immediately.

          He can't close up. He has to prepay to use CS for a year or else get sued. That's what people don't like about this. If it was just a cease-and-desist letter, no one would care. But it's not.

          Though he may go out of business anyways, if he can't pay up within the next 10 (well, now
          • I'm saying that he should pay up regardless. He should close up if he really didn't know what he was doing. If that's his only source of income and he has to keep it going to pay the fee, then those are the breaks. However, I'd recommend that he try to find other means (getting employed) to pay up, because if this was because if he was unknowledgeable (slim chance; he was in the business) we wouldn't want him to fuck up again.

            He was in a position where he definitely should've known and because of that it'

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • and CAN they demand it(so that it would go through in court)?

    of course, it's not like they've yet gotten the deserved amount of money from half-life 1 yet so it's perfectly reasonable. not.

    also, there's numerous cases where people who have bought brand new copies(in plastic) of half-life to get to play cs and only to notice that the key is already in use(there's some keygens you can use to brute force to find a working online key.. I'm guessing thats whats happening) - probably the half-life's key system
    • Valve owns Counter-Strike. They bought it, and now have the legal rights to do whatever they wish to it. At this point, I would say that Valve has probably rewritten most of the original code that was once in Counter-Strike. With that said, is the licensing just? Maybe not, Valve should refund all the cybercafe's the money that they spent on the boxed items.

      Although, the cybercafe program that Valve has allows all of the Valve's games to be playable for $9/month (per computer)... unless it's been recentl
    • (not to mention how bad the online gameplay experience with cs can be nowadays.. *cough* wallhack *cough* aim-enhancer *cough* )

      First, this slashdot forum/article is/was a side headline on news.google.com (my first check of news for the day ususally--I like how they give you the ability to see how long ago the news was posted). It kind of threw a wrentch into the integrity of the site... using a slashdot forum as a primary source of valid information ^_^ .

      As far as aimbotting and wallhacking go, I rarel
    • "of course, it's not like they've yet gotten the deserved amount of money from half-life 1 yet so it's perfectly reasonable. not."

      Of course not. We all know that once video game developers meet their financial projections, they don't deserve to make any more money than that. >_>

  • Well, duh. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by schild ( 713993 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @07:22AM (#9406059) Homepage Journal
    Just because Valve makes great games on their own time frame and has a huge community of players making mods and continually playing their 5+ year old games doesn't mean they aren't a money grubbing company.

    Some people seem to forget that they are in the money making business, and being the company that made Counter-Strike, they will probably milk that license until something threatens to dethrone it.

    I wish that I could say that Valve is in the wrong on this one, but they can charge whatever they want to let companies commercially profit from their games.

    So, the question is, is this news? Or is it incredibly appropriate and just more free press for Valve with the inevitable release of Half-Life 2? I mean the story "Valve tells CyberCafe that fucked up to pay them money for using their product irresponsibly" isn't exactly newsworthy.... Cease and Desists are merely the respectable way (and somewhat traditional way) to go about things. But, IANAL and might just me missing the point completely. So tag me as flamebait appropriately.
    • I wouldn't call them a "money grubbing company." Valve is one of (if not the best) gaming company that supports their community, and their mod communities. As you can see, two mods that were created under the original engine went retail and they hired several developers from the mods (Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat).

      Valve has nearly 100 employees (the last time I checked), if you wish them to continue to be in business, you need to remember that they need to pay their employees (as any business). I don
    • Get over it - valve did NOT make counter-strike. Yes they bought it after a year or so of development and many many releases, but the game and the core gameplay system that apparently STILL is going to be used in the half-life 2 game as multiplayer (including the exact same animations and voice samples) was created by a team of volunteers, NOT employees.

      Their reward for creating the greatest online game ever? Millions of dollars maybe?

      No, valve APPRECIATES gamers, really they do - these lucky folks, in
    • What I'm trying to figure out is, why didn't he just install the steam program on the computers and let the users download their own games. afterall steam and a steam account are free, and the users are the ones that pay. it even says that those users names/passwords are the key to their copy/purchaced software for hl/bs/cs/of/ ... etc.

      so the cyber cafe offered the user the seat, and the customer paid for the software.

      that's like saying "Hey, you can use my computer, but you have to pay for a windows li

  • Being a game center owner... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MongooseCN ( 139203 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @08:02AM (#9406149) Homepage
    Since I'm about to open a game center this month, I have been following this issue closely. Valve has always been a sketchy company. They offer poor to non-existant support for their products. Their products run poorly (anyone use Steam lately?). As for licensing, they have been backtracking and restating information about the license program. After seeing all this, I refused to carry Valve games.

    As for other centers... Intially when Valve came out with the new license, everyone found it ridiculous and continued running their centers as usual. A few spokesmen for Valve said that if they continued with the licensing scheme, they would issue cease and desist orders to any center using their games and not paying the license fees. So game centers would be allowed to remove the games to avoid legal action. Most game centers figured they would continue running the games and, in the worst case, be forced to remove the games.

    A year or so went by with no change in Valves statements about enforcing the licenses.

    Valve suddenly decides, out of the blue, to issue lawsuits to all game centers with CS. Instead of issuing the cease and desist order like they said though, they decided to force game centers to pay for a yearly license. That's about $2400-$3000 up front. That's painfully difficult for most game centers which barely break even. A typical game center makes around $500 a month in profit. 99% of game centers are mom & pop shops run by 1 person and 2-3 employees. They generate little income.

    Personally, I think Valve downplayed the licensing issue to get as many centers using their software as possible. Then they attacked all the centers to force them to pay license fees or be sued out of existance. Kind of like MS's policy of allowing foreign countries to pirate their software. Then when lots of people have the software, threaten legal action and create a huge new revenue stream. I am no longer supporting Valve products.
    • Okay when is the last time you've run Steam? Steam has been working properly for the past few months - no crashes and quick updates. What more do you want from it? If you have an adequate internet connection it will be fine.

      As for Valve not supporting their products; how much more support do you want for a 5 year old game engine? You're lucky they are supporting it at all, the only other company that supports their games as much as Valve is Epic (Unreal series). ID doesn't even come close.

      Go ahead and
      • As for Valve not supporting their products; how much more support do you want for a 5 year old game engine?
        To be fair, it is their only product and source of income, they HAVE TO support it. We well see if they still support old products when hl2 is out. I mean, really out, not "omg i use outlook" out.
        • They don't "HAVE TO" support anything. Those are the terms of Valve's licensing system. It may not be good business sense for Valve, but it's their choice as a company to do so. You don't like it? Tough. Don't offer Valve's games.

          • They don't "HAVE TO" support anything.

            That's a common myth of software development. While they aren't necessairly obliged to support productis, failing to do so leaves a bad mark on the image of the company. As an example, look at the Opposing Forces expansion pack. The version released under steam is sub-standard (and outdated) - as a result, playeers need to perform a seperate download in order to be able to use the CTF gameplay modes.

            The same mistake is made by other companies as well. Take a lo

            • Of course they aren't obliged. That's why, if you read closely, you caught my disclaimer about it not necessarily being good business sense to ignore consumer problems. No one ever said it was a smart thing to do, but some game developers are certainly doing it.

              As for EA, they continue to be the most powerful video game publisher in the world and they have been doing it for well over 15 years. Suffice it to say, after countless Sims expansion packs, EA doesn't have any scruples about running a series i

              • Although, I must admit, I never had any of those problems you've had with Red Alert 2, which runs perfectly fine for me at the highest resolution.

                IThe problems are there, and are well known on certain C&C boards. In particular, the resolution problem can be found when you head to the Westwood Online multiplayer options and select either "Quick Match" or "World Domination Tour". You will receive a prompt stating that this game mode can only be played at 640x480. This is fixed in the expansion pack,

          • you're completly off topic. I was not talking about their licensing system, i was responding about the fact that they still support a 5 years old game. Being their only game, they HAVE TO support it. Especially since they build the hype for their next (second) product on this first one. When
          • SUPPORT: they expect these guys to pay EVERY MONTH for a five year old program?

            nuf said!

      • The last time I tried to run Steam? A few days ago. It would crash horribly after half a minute. The sound didn't work. It took an age to download, and it still takes literally hours to update. I do have an adequate internet connection. What Steam wants is an extremely powerful internet connection
        • That's funny because I'm running Steam on several different systems, different hardware configurations, different versions of Windows (hell, even Linux) and it's been running solid for the past few months. Not a crash once.

          Now if you consider a game crashing a Steam error, than yes, some of the games have crash errors. But that's not Steam. The only problem Steam has is bandwidth issues - when a big patch is pushed out on the network sometimes it takes a few hours to get the full patch.

          We're not back

      • Let's be fair to ID... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by g051051 ( 71145 )
        I would like to point out that ID has provided what can be termed the "ultimate" support. They released the source code to their old games. As a result, I can play old ID games on modern machines with modern machines and snazzy graphics, and the games are maintained by people who do it as a labor of love.

      • id doesn't even come close

        nor does it have to, for the following reasons:

        1) They have a rabid army of people fighting to support their old product, courtesy of the gpl.

        2) On the off chance that you discover a one-in-a-million bug that only occurs on your machine, it is possible for you or someone you know to troubleshoot it, again due to the open-source nature of their product.

        Of course, this doesn't apply to quake 3 and later (YET), but you were referring to id's old "unsupported" product.

        As for me, I

      • Do me a favor.

        Install Steam on a gaming capable machine. Then, install a Steam CS LAN dedicated server on another machine.

        Now, log into your Steam account on the gaming machine and connect to the LAN dedicated server. If both machines happen to have Internet access while having internal IPs (10.x.x.x, 192.168.x.x), you can't play on your own server.

        How's that for a problem?

    • What is it that you are offering for hire? I submit that it is not the game, but the venue which includes heat, lighting, a network and a machine per player. The majority of gamers will have their own copy of the game the wish to play, so problem solved. Image the hard disk and restore it after each session, let the customer bring their own copy of the game and install it for the session, and at the end of the session restore the image. That way the company loses the licensing fees that you currently pa

  • This is only right (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Hido ( 655301 )
    Valve is not a charity organization after all and I say good for them. The problem is that this I-Cafe has been making a profit from Valves hard work (however old this work may be) and I think that it is only fair that Valve gets renumeration for the work they did.

    As for all the people flaming Valve I ask you, if you were running a business and you find out that somebody is making a profit off your sweat and blood while your getting *zip* what would you guys have to say about it?

    I sure has hell would not

    • Re:This is only right (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The fact is they DID make a profit off it, the retail version of CS. Valve did not make CS, but CS DID make Valve. They should not forget this and should support these cafes, because without them Valve would be squat. They should chanrge a nominal fee, based on monthly usage numbers.

      • Valve did not make CS

        No, but Valve bought CS. They have continued to develop CS. That gives them the right to do whatever they want to do with it. It may've been developed by community people originally, but it's Valve's now.

        Personally I think there licensing system generally isn't very good, they seem to really like the idea that you lease your software, something that I really don't like personally. But if that's what they want to do, they can do it. Not that I'm going to buy it myself...

        Plus suing p

    • As for all the people flaming Valve I ask you, if you were running a business and you find out that somebody is making a profit off your sweat and blood while your getting *zip* what would you guys have to say about it?

      Whose sweat and blood (lol, like they suck the blood out of their employees or something--or is it a metaphor meant to make it seems more heinous?) went in to making the game? The programmers and artists. Who gets payed by this exorbitant license? The Valve/Sierra/whoever stockholders.

      Who
    • There's these places called hardware stores. They sell tools for building houses!!!! But I only PAY for the tool once per worker. Often if it breaks they give me another for FREE!!

      They must be doing something wrong because they don't charge for usage per house you build....

      I call Bullshit!!!

  • ...is that this cyber-cafe has legal copies of CS and HL. However, Valve's license doesn't allow you to make money from your use of HL or the HL engine (imagine if MS did this with Windows or Office). Since the cyber-cafe charged people to play the games, they are in violation of Valve's license. Valve has every right to do this. However, the cyber-cafe has probably already given Valve thousands of dollars by purchasing HL for each of the computers. Is this any way to treat one of your better customers? I

  • The story behind the story (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12, 2004 @08:54AM (#9406349)
    In the world of commercial game licensing Valve stands alone for being one of the most difficult and unreasonable developers. Valve is inflexible, unwilling to listen, unwilling to compromise, and shrill in their approach to game centers; the same game centers that are responsible for keeping for so many years the interest of players in their jewel game: Counterstrike. A game center is a powerful tool for developers and publishers to deliver their content directly to the customers who matter most: gamers. Many game publishers understand the strength and penetration of this marketing channel and have developed commercial use policies that are much more favorable to game centers. Their policies serve to promote their games and create an environment where game centers are enticed to continue to support the games and the customers' interests by facilitating a variety of competitive events on local, regional, and national levels.

    Operating a gaming center is no small task. There is no single-point licensing scheme like there is in music industry. The variety of fragmented game licensing schemes makes for a difficult operating environment and drives up overhead. If Valve succeeds in forcing game centers to pay unreasonable fees to use their software, how long will it take for the other publishers to demand the same thing? Imagine each publisher demanding $3000/year for a game title. If an average gaming center carries only 10 game titles, the total price for just making the games available to the customers will be a staggering $30,000/year. What if there are 20 titles? That's $60,000/year! Most gaming centers don't see that kind of money in an entire year. Forcing game centers to pay these fees will most certainly destroy the gaming center industry in the United States.
    • That's $60,000/year! Most gaming centers don't see that kind of money in an entire year. Forcing game centers to pay these fees will most certainly destroy the gaming center industry in the United States.

      If gaming centers aren't seeing that kind of money in an entire year then they are doomed anyway. $60k is inadequate to pay for staff alone. Throw in money for space, maintenance, new hardware and costs far exceed the numbers you give.

      Clearly you don't have much business sense. To run a business you f

  • Why is this a FPP? Shut up and pay up FFS... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    umm, let me get this right. 9 bucks, per PC, per month. That is NOT a lot of cash. If it was too much for this particular business to afford, I suspect they have trouble meeting their other obligations. If they failed to purchase legitimate licenses for the software they are using to generate income, then Valve is being very generous in giving tham an amnesty. What would Micro$oft or say, SCO do in this circumstance?

    "Small business forced to pay its' bills. Film at eleven!" - hardly material for a FPP

    • Re:Why is this a FPP? Shut up and pay up FFS... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, Microsoft lets the cybercafes use the games as long as the center buy legitimate copies.

      The $9/month may not seem like much, but it adds up to about $540 per computer per copy of Counter Strike, had they been using it since the beginning.

      Moreover, it is the principle of the thing. If every software company charged that much, there is no way even well-run businesses could survive. It may not seem a lot to you, but multiply that number by ten or twenty. Then figure out how much money you can make when
      • Then the person running the business should have done his maths beforehand.

        Noone has a given right to use someone elses property to make money from.

        If this cost is too hight, then lok at providing different products of move to a different model
        • Noone has a given right to use someone elses property to make money from

          That's a pretty short sighted view. They sold a copy of the product to me. It's mine, not theirs.

          Imagine, if you will, that Black and Decker (the tools people) required any contractor who uses a B&D drill to pay them $5 a month if they use the drill to do work for a customer? There's no extra work for B&D, they have already sold the product, but suddenly they have a huge additional revenue stream which would very quickly o
          • And into this cost argument, where do you factor in the cost of development, the cost of the training and education of the developers, the cost of marketing and the cost of the risk involved in the whole venture?

            As someone who has invested over quarter of a century into my education I take such a trivialisation of its value very poorly, as should all professionals of any field.

            Software is expensive to write, there is no way out of that. Period.

            Besides, your example of using B&D tools is an interestin
          • An addition, regarding the B&D or axe arguments.

            You physically own that material that the tools is made from. You have the right to do with it as you please. However, you do not own the IP that went into its design and manufacture. Thus, you are not allowed to buy a B&D drill, take it apart and use its components to create fabrication tools to make copies of it.

            Software is, by its nature, this kind of intangible IP. There is NO physical representation of it. The physical disk/CD whatever is all th
          • This is a pretty unique aspect of computer program sales.
            How is this any different from the rest of the entertainment industry? Making money off of public exhibitions will cost you extra. it's the same for music and movies.

            Not saying it's right, but its not that unusual.
  • IANAL but valves license is probably illegal. There is little difference between what valve is trying to do and what the RIAA has tried to do unsuccessfully to restaurants.

    If you own a restaurant you can go 2 ways about putting music in your business. You can buy home equipment, CD's and a radio receiver, or you can purchase commercial equipment. If you take the first route you pay once and never a licensing fee. If you take the second you pay the terms the RIAA dictates.

    The reason for the difference
    • Wrong. The RIAA has people that go around to check if people are playing over the air music in a place of business with out paying the correct 'tax' to them.

      You just can't turn a radio on and allow your customers the ability to here it. Hell, those customers might buy their music and that would be...
    • At least in the US, you're wrong.

      If you're playing music in a public place (like a resturaunt), you're paying. Radio? Pay for every station you play. CDs? Pay based on how many CDs you play a week/month. Satellite radio? Pay for every station, AND pay the satellite provider extra. Net streaming? God help you.

      Now, enforcement is an issue. A place could go years without running into any trouble. But all it takes is someone who works for a label (or the RIAA) to walk in and notice that, why, that s

  • Valve (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @09:41AM (#9406539)
    It's fashionable to bitch about Valve and Steam, but Steam is a great system, and Valve has been great to its community. First off they hired Bram Cohen, the Bittorrent author, so they have serious technical chutzpah under the hood. Secondly, for a SEVEN YEAR OLD GAME I bought once for like $30-50, I have in my game list: Counter-Strike, Day of Default, Half Life, Team Fortress Classic, Death Match Classic, and Opposing Force, all games produced by Valve, for, you guessed it FREE. That is not to mention Ricochet (which is pretty useless) and tons of other mods I have (Natural Selection being probably the best). Now with these FREE games I get: A builtin server browser, a friends list, and guess what FREE UPDATES. Mod authors also get a channel to deploy their mods. For now it is, um, FREE, but they will in the future be able to license their games. Now for me, Joe Freeloader, that's not so great, but for mod authors that kicks ass. Where else has a company said: well, you're making a great mod for our game, you know what, we'll let you sell it, in OUR distribution channel on OUR bandwidth!

    I think that is a hell of a lot for some piece of software I bought 7 FREAKING YEARS AGO. I think that is a pretty good deal. And if they perhaps want to get a cut from somebody else making profit off THEIR distribution and update system, that seems ok to me. I don't know the details of this particular incident, and perhaps Valve could have been more tactful, but Valve in general has been GREAT to the community. They even run forums wherein every luser on earth gets to post: "St34m 4re t3h suks. I h4te you. G1ve m3 m0re g4mes b1tch. kthxbai."
    • First off they hired Bram Cohen, the Bittorrent author, so they have serious technical chutzpah under the hood.

      I certainly appreciate Bram's work, but BitTorrent was not a terribly difficult system to build -- it is just about the simplest of the P2P systems.

      Bram's earlier work on Mojo Nation is actually technically much more interesting.

      Bram does a better job of analyzing node actions from a game-theoretic standpoint and not trusting nodes at all, which is a viewpoint sorely lacking in the P2P communit
      • Actually, it's rumored that after HL2 comes out, along with all the ports of old games, HL1 stuff IS going to be released openly. It's all well and good that id gpls its old games, but the they have the luxury of profitting from new engines and platforms by the time they gpl their old ones. Valve is still on their first game/platform.
  • I may be way of base here, but what if the game centers just charged people for admission into the place and the actual gaming was free? Would that remove them from paying any type of fee? Think of it as a strip club that has no cover charge but yet when you get in a glass of coke costs $10
  • Would it be possible for people to bring in their own disks (USB disks, perhaps? How cheap can you make a 10GB USB disk?) with their own copy of HL installed and play off those? They're using their own copy, and not copying it, and not having it installed on multiple machines (read: hard drives), so the license is satisfied.

    Heck, with a little special Daemontools-in-revers software it might be possible to convince the Steam installer that an .iso image is a conventional hard disk and to do all its installs

    • Would it be possible for people to bring in their own disks (USB disks, perhaps? How cheap can you make a 10GB USB disk?) with their own copy of HL installed and play off those? They're using their own copy, and not copying it, and not having it installed on multiple machines (read: hard drives), so the license is satisfied.

      From what I see, there's no problem installing anything on a mobilehard drive. While some agressive lawyers may attempt to say that's piracy, nothing in a EULA states that a software

  • I'm not purchasing Half Life 2. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12, 2004 @11:49AM (#9407186)
    Valve is doing a major disservice to the gaming community.

    With the death of arcades, gamers are at a loss for places to socialize with eachother. Cyber Cafes are the new kind of arcade. But if every game costs $3000 to license then that is going to put many cyber cafes out of business, and keep many from starting up in the first place.

    No game company should have the right to prohibit someone from renting time on a PC and using the software contained on it. Imagine if car companies could do the same for cars... You'd be paying 10x as much whenever you needed to rent a car when traveling.

    Why should a software company be allowed to do this?

    We allow software licenses, because software is not a physical commodity. It is easily duplicated, and we need to protect it from being copied.

    We also allow licenses because software can be buggy and software companies would be sued out of existence if they could not protect themselves from such lawsuits.

    But nobody ever intended for software licenses to allow software developers to create new, machiavellian ways of controlling how you use the software. What if Microsoft could put in a license agreement that no copy of Microsoft Windows is allowed to be used to write a review of Microsoft software which is not positive? The way license agreements are going, this is the state we will be in at some point in the future.

    Valve should have NO right to prohibit me from selling time on my PC. And no right to prohibit a cyber cafe from selling time on their PC's. So long as each PC has one copy of the software, and only one user can use it at a time, that should be the extent of Valve's rights via software license.

    If Valve persists with these lawsuits, I will not be buying Half Life 2, and I will encourage my freinds online to boycott it as well. As a gamer, I do not want their crazy licensing costs to be passed on to me when I use a cyber cafe, and I do not want cyber cafes I use to shut down as a result of being unable to afford the license, and as a fellow game developer, I will not support a game company that pulls egotistical greedy crap like this. It is BAD ENOUGH that Valve's steam software now uses POP UP ADS to alert you when a new product comes out that they want to push. The banner ads were annoying as it was.

    • Re:I'm not purchasing Half Life 2. (Score:4, Informative)

      by ChopsMIDI ( 613634 ) on Saturday June 12, 2004 @01:03PM (#9407583) Homepage
      What if Microsoft could put in a license agreement that no copy of Microsoft Windows is allowed to be used to write a review of Microsoft software which is not positive? The way license agreements are going, this is the state we will be in at some point in the future.

      Interestingly enough, Microsoft has put a similar clause in their frontpage EULA:
      "You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services, infringe any intellectual property or other rights of these parties, violate any state, federal or international law, or promote racism, hatred or pornography."
      • Well in that case (i'm running XP, and i opened up IE just for this)...

        Fuck Microsoft!

        *waits for lawsuit*
  • Anybody following their products, as I assume a LAN center operator surely must, would certainly know about VALVe's CyberCafe licencing program; it's been mentioned many times on sites like PlanetHalfLife, and over and over again on the official Steam website (Steam being the online component to modern Half-Life), steampowered.com.

    Even I have heard much about the licence, and I'm just a gamer. There's even a whole section on steampowered.com about it.

  • Valve's "games" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by superultra ( 670002 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @01:01AM (#9411496) Homepage
    I'm amused by the comments here, mostly about Valve protecting "their games", or about how Valve has a right to protect "their" intellectual property.

    Let's get this straight: Valve has made one game. One. Not two, not three; one. How many people out there are still playing the single player game? Because that's all Valve has ever done. Even Steam, which is the second (or first) coming of the Messiah based on what you'd read here, was mostly developed by hired people from outside of Valve. Counter-Strike was not even an intentional gamble on behalf of Valve. It was a completely random lightning strike, lady luck smiling on Gabe Newell and friends. Counter-Strike, and the community that surrounded it, are the only reasons Valve has the power to hire lawyers expensive enough to bully around these gaming centers. Valve exists, now, because of chance and luck, solely because of the efforts of other people. If it weren't for Counter-Strike, a game designed altogether by other people (and for free), Valve would've forced the same pressured deadlines as any other developer so that they could feed their families. They haven't had to deal with that because of the efforts of gamers, and they have the nads to do stuff like this? We don't even know if Valve's sophmore effort will be any good.

    They've outright lied to the gaming community (September 30), they pull stunts like this, and like an abused wife we keep coming back. Why do we keep kissing their ass?
  • I have the right to rent it to who I please. How is copywrited work different (so long as I'm not making additional copies)? You're right under copyright is an unlimited and sole right to make copies. It's not a patent for Christ's sake. The author shouldn't get to dictate terms of use, only the conditions under which copies are made and obtained. Anything more is giving undue power to copywrite holders.

  • License Terms (Score:2, Informative)

    by SolarCurve ( 659906 )
    Are you guys even aware of what the terms are? It's not that LAN Centers are trying to screw valve. A copy of the game is legally purchased for each machine. Fair enough right? No, Valve insists on an additional $10 per machine per MONTH. I operate 2 centers with 20 computers each. I purchased legally 40+ copies of Halflife BEFORE Steam was released. We were legal until they made this change to the steam engine. They change to STEAM and then decide we are illegal if we don't pony up the cash every month. T
  • What I would like to know in regards to this is: where is the license shown on the distributed media?

    That is, is there something on the outside of the packaging which states that media are licensed for non-commercial use? Is it in the instruction manual. During the game install?

    If it's on the inside of the box - as with many pieces of software - this is just playing dirty. Especially since, in many cases, stores have a no-return policy on software media (due to piracy issues) unless it's provably defect

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