Valve and VU Games Settle Lawsuit

[Blink]

You may or may not remember the on-going lawsuit with Valve & VU, over Steam and the fact that it stops the need for a publisher. Well it seems the case has reached a conclusion:

"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 counterclaims. 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.

Additionally, VU Games has notified distributors and cyber cafes that were licensed by VU Games that only Valve is authorized to distribute Valve games to cyber cafés and grant cyber café licenses. Cyber café operators that were licensed by VU Games have also been notified that any license agreement from Sierra Entertainment, Vivendi Universal Games or any of their affiliates or distributors that may have granted rights to use Valve games in cyber cafés, whether written or oral, is terminated."

According to PlanetHalfLife Doug Lombardi had this to add:

"We are making arrangements to continue retail distribution of our products post August 31. Should have more details to share soon."

[Jest@]

intriuging. How are Valve gonna handle retail sales with no publisher?

I think this is a sign that steam-style delivery systems are gonna become more common for PC games, hopefully freeing some games companies of publisher troubles. For all its flaws, i think steam's a pretty good systyem all in all.

Only problem is that if every games company did it, it's gonna get very very messy indeed. Someone needs to coordinate an umbrella system for these things.

[snufflez]

i hope they can find some way to distrubute it retail, im not very "trusting" so to speak with credit cards on the internet

[dragonfliet]

From Halflife2.net:

Update: Also, for those of you worrying that we might be left with Steam as the only option for buying Valve games, I received this response from Doug Lombardi earlier:
We are making arrangements to continue retail distribution of our products post August 31. Should have more details to share soon.
At the moment the current speculations are that Activision may take over from VU Games. Remember, back in April 2003, Valve signed a multi-title deal, all starting with Day of Defeat, who are also publishing Day of Defeat: Source, so they may also take on the rest of Valve's back catalogue.

So all retail peoples should be covered it seems