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."

Comments

what does this mean?

[luvbassonacid]

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

Re:what does this mean?

[Datasage]

As far as i can tell its not. The legal judgement is over cyber cafe distribution. Basically it states that valve cant be cut out of any cyber cafe distribtion deal.

Re:what does this mean?

[fireduck]

the backstory can be found here. Valve was suing Sierra because they were distributing HL to cyber-cafes, seemingly w/o Valve's authorization. sounds like cyber-cafes weren't in Sierra's distribution pervue, and Valve was annoyed that their games were given away (?) to cafes.

Not sure what this means, except Valve has control over their games in cyber-cafes now. Given their community friendly stance, I don't see this as a bad thing (although if Sierra was just giving the game away previously, I don't see that as bad for the community either.)

Re:what does this mean?

[PIPBoy3000]

As sebastard on Evil Avatar pointed out, cybercafes are a multi-billion dollar business overseas. Vivendi took a different approach to selling things like Counterstrike to these cybercafe owners (Valve uses Steam and a play-for-play approach).

I suspect that Vivendi will be paying Valve a fair bit of money in the near future.

Re:what does this mean?

[Tobias Luetke]

Caffes pay 10$ a month per computer for steam. Other than blizzard games ( which are 5k per year for all their games on up to 20 computers ) and ea games ( 850$ per year license for all ea games ) other games just require buying them.

Re:what does this mean?

[realdpk]

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

Re:what does this mean?

[unclethursday]

Given their community friendly stance

Right, which is why Valve has helped out in expanding the community by wanting millions upon millions of dollars in licensing fees in order for someone to license Half-Life for Mac, right?

Valve is only 'community friendly' because without those user made mods, no one would still care about Half-Life this long after its release. Half-Life was semi-popular, and a decent game, but it wasn't until a small team of users made a little teensy mod called Counter-Strike that Half-Life really took off. Team Fortress Classic was popular for a while, but when Counter-Strike really hit, it completely took over the Half-Life onlne world.

Seriously, almost no one plays Half-Life itself, but Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat and such are still popular.

Valve pretty much owes its popularity to the community, not from their actual Half-Life game, which is basically a Quake 1 engine game with some Quake 2 features hacked in with a pretty decent story.

Without the community making those mods, no one would have cared about Half-Life enough to have made Half-Life 2 possible this long after the original.

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

Re:Cyber cafes in general

[chrismcdirty]

I believe the whole thing about games being banned in Greece was a step to curb illegal gambling, and the law passed included pretty much any type of video game. But it was later modified in order to just include gambling games, not all games.

Re:A good thing?

[Austerity Empowers]

It is a good thing when it comes to contracts. We have been able to keep quite a few people employed by selling rights to 3rd parties to distribute in limited geographies we won't go to anyhow. For example, someone wants to sell equipment in Turkey, we don't have any business or foothold there, it'd cost a lot for us to even try. We do have partners however who live there and can do business profitably, they just need our product to sell. More power to them, but they better not sell to anyone else. Thus limitation is a good thing. In this particular case it is good too, Valve made the game, they own it, not the publisher. The publisher in this case was given the right to sell the game to a specific market. Vivendi needed to be smacked for the old fashioned belief that they simply own anything they are chosen to publish. Bad doggie.

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.

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.

Valve's Cyber Cafe 'Agreement'

[SilverThorn]

After talking w/ a Valve sales partner, the cyber cafe agreement is that of a pay per computer agreement for the Steam application.

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

I can see where this is going ...

[2TecTom]

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.