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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."
how is this significant? not trolling... rather im encouraging the flow of meaningful conversation :)
--- Why rant when you can rave?
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
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Well, a contract is a contract, but is limitation of distribution such a good thing in the larger scheme of things?
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.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Maybe now cafes will have to carry games other than fucking Counterstrike.
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.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
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.
You gotta make something explode to really understand it...examine all those tiny particles while they're still on fire.
This is where the fun part comes out of it:
- It depends where you live for licensing rights to use the Steam application and its games.
- There is also a minimum of 10 computers that must be signed up for using Valve's Steam application.
After a quick inquiry, my rate (for living on the East Coast) was $10/per machine per month ($100/month for 10 computers -- quick math for you non-geeks). Comes out to around $1200 per year.Noted that some places this would be a decent deal expecially if you have a large crowd of players, but if you are in a small town (like where I am), forget having any of Valve's Steam-based games if it means just breaking even on a per month basis.
-- M
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
I was involved with several cyber / gaming cafes that went broke largely due to licensing issues. In fact, if the full license fees had been paid, these fees would have been the single greatest expense, exceeding that of wages or lease costs.
It's been my experience that many gaming places don't have sufficent numbers of retail licenses nor do they pay extra for commercial site licenses, all of whom call for regular on-going payments. If they did, they'd be unprofitable.
Here's my prediction. The big corporate publishers will abuse licensing, eliminate mom & pop cafes and replace them with franchises.
Words to men, as air to birds.
Valve & Vivendi are in another legal battle concerning the sale of HL2 on Steam. Apparently the deal was inked back when Steam was still in beta, and Valve told Vivendi that they didn't expect steam sales to even come close to retail sales. However, with Valve's early release of Counter-Strike Source bundled with a to-be-released copy of HL2, and the midnight activation on release day, Valve has sold tons of copies of HL2 on Steam. Vivendi is suing Valve for misleading them on steam sales, causing them to agree to the contract under false assumptions. However, there was no specific clause limiting steam sales in any way. This is much different that the one in the article as Vivendi explicitly broke a clause in the contract, whereas in this one Valve did not.
Look at this case as the first blow in a legal battle... The next of which is due in court by December 31st.