Valve and Vivendi Universal Games Settle Lawsuit
April 29, 2005, 9:47 am · Chris Bokitch
Bellevue, WA and Los Angeles, CA - April 29, 2005 -- Valve and Vivendi Universal Games (VU Games) today announced the settlement of a pending federal court lawsuit filed by Valve in August 2002. The parties have resolved their differences, and the settlement provides for the dismissal of all claims and coaunterclaims. Under the settlement agreement, VU Games will cease distribution of retail packaged versions of Valve's games, including Half-Life®, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike™, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source, effective August 31, 2005.

http://www.steampowered.com/index.php?area=news

Seems clear cut: Valve could easily prove that VU was breaching their contract so they settled and VU got away with a much lesser punishment than they would have otherwise. Now, they won't be selling HL games anymore and all the licenses they issued to cybercafes are hereby terminated (no mention of whether those cafes get their money back).

As everyone knows, I'm not a big fan of any of the HL games nor Valve nor VU, so I guess it didn't matter to me either way on this lawsuit. The whole thing was crap and both companies have copped squats on their customers countless times... *sigh*

But they are Valves distrubuter, weren't they? So .. weren't they supposed to sell it for them? I'm really in on the dark on this one..
So they like .. stole the games from Valve and sold them to make money for themselves?

Exactly.

So...is Valve doing its own distribution?

Are they going to release the games in retail anymore?

What about HL2:Aftermath, does anyone know how this will affect how it's sold?

Steam?

I suppose so, but that seems like an extremely inefficient way of distributing it - it works best when in conjunction with a packaged, retail version.

it's best to paraphrase an article than reproduce it completelly onto another website. Just a small warning in case someone does a search and sees this.

Anyway, I really don't understand why valve is poking at their distributor. Why?

JediKirby

Because Vivendi wasn't giving them enough freedom, Vivendi was (apparently) illegally distributing Valve's games, and they were also being really strict about what Valve was allowed to do with Steam... or some crap like that. I don't know the specifics

That's all valid things, but I think the real issue that was sued over was VU was selling cyber-cafe licenses when it had no right to do so.

this mean if I ever want a copy of HL2, buy it NOW before it becomes a collector's item on ebay? because although my comp can't run it...I was planning on upgrading and getting that game..but that'll take a while...

I highly doubt that.

Half Life 2 doesn't take that much system requirements I'm able to run it on a dual processor pentium 3 800 mhz with no problems... what are you running a pentium 2 or something?

1 ghz, windows 98, 32mb graphics...CAN I PLAY IT DOC!? CAN I!? Better yet, can I get it to a framerate that's playable!?

Hell yes you can!

You just need to keep the graphics on a mediumish setting.

This doesn't mean you won't see HL2 boxed anymore, just not from vivendi (who sucks anyways)
THOUGH I would make sure to pick up blueshift before it's gone, and...there were a couple others that aren't available on steam.

it's not the video card I'm worried about, but my processor..the box says it requires 1.1 ghz, but i've got 1.0, and I'm worried with things like the grav gun and other physic engine things liek that's I'll get about 6 FPS like I did with Dekta Force: Black Hawk Down

6 fps? Nah. 20-30, probably. Minimum requirements usually aren't the BARE minimum.