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Actually, it looks like Valve is hoping to do its publisihg internally (at least its online sales), with the advent of Steam, their content delivery system. It's quite neat actually.

The slide presentation to STEAM strongly hints that Valve (part of the Vivendi juggernaut) is planning a move to pay-to-play model for online gaming similar to Everquest. I wasn't able to find the exact page again where I read this, but IIRC CS was expected to go all STEAM around the release of v1.6 or v1.7. There was also mention that suggested mod authors were going to have to pay money to Valve to write a mod. (I think it was around $1000. I really wish I could find the page again.) This would be truly discouraging turn of events for mod authors.

The reason I even noticed about this potential policy change was that I have spent the couple of years writing mods for HL myself and now am wondering if it's time to change engines. (The Ogre engine looks pretty darn good, but I don't think it has a networking support yet.)

There is one other reason to take note of STEAM is that it requires a broadband connection (Dialup and 128K ISDN need not apply. 384Kb/sec throughput is the minimum.) This means that if you don't use cable, you're screwed. This is quite a change from when you could play Q1/Q2 on a 28Kb modem. The interesting thing is that it's not the game itself that requires this bandwidth, but rather it's distributed file system of the steam DRM. Is this the wave of the future? Will gamers cry foul? Time will tell.

lhl.linuxgames.com is a great site for running Half Life and CS under wine. CS currently runs fine, however valve is moving to a new distribution method: steam which I have not been able to get to work with wine or wineX. Hence my post.