Valve versus Sierra [Sep 20, 2004, 11:34 am ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Valve vs.
Vivendi Universal dogfight heats up in US District Court on GameSpot (thanks
Democritus) reveals some details of a behind-the-scenes legal battle between
Valve and Sierra (now part of VU Games) over Half-Life and Half-Life 2 that's
been brewing for several years now. The article picks through details of a
recent court filing by Valve that reveals the current state of the litigation,
which has its next court date on October 8, though an actual trial is not
scheduled until March 21, 2005. Included are disputes over what
role Steam is to take in the game's distribution and who actually holds rights
to the Half-Life intellectual property. Here's a segment that summarizes some of
this:
In court filings, Sierra/VUG says that the current distribution of Half-Life 2 via Steam exceeds the scope of the current software publishing agreement between the two parties. It is apparently seeking the court's assistance in compelling Valve not to use Steam as an avenue of distribution.
On Friday, when asked if Valve was remained intent on making Half-Life 2 available to gamers via Steam, regardless of what was determined on October 8, Lombardi replied, "Yes."
Interestingly, and in spite of the ongoing legal dispute, Sierra/VUG still wants to work with Valve in the future and is asking the court via filings to force Valve to work with it on whatever is next in the development pipeline. It asks the court, in filings, "for a declaration that Sierra and VUG have the right to a fourth engine license pursuant to the terms of...the 2001 Agreement."
According to Lombardi, "We're going to meet the obligations of our current agreement."
>Getting HL2 via Steam may be okay for some, but I want a hard
>copy that I can re-install at my leisure. Reformat your
>system and have to wait for it to download all over again, no
>thanks. Even game installs can get corrupted and need to be
>uninstalled/reinstalled.
Steam has two major functionalities that work somewhat independent of each other,
1) It can authenticate your game purchase
2) It can stream games for you over the internet.
For authentication, all Steam wants is a way to connect a game to your Steam account. If you buy a boxed copy, you'll give your CD-key (*if* you want to use Steam), if you buy online, Steam already knows that you as an account holder own this game.
This authentication needs to be done just *once*.
Once Steam knows that you own a certain game, it doesn't care where you get the files from. You can,
a) Have the boxed copy
b) Have a CD or DVD backup
c) Ask a friend to copy his game files for you
d) Ask a friend to download game files for you
e) Start streaming the files on a broadband connection at a place you are visiting (maybe a friend or relative's place)
That's actually the best part about Steam. That once you have authenticated a game, there are no CD-checks, no reason to keep CD in drives, no copy protection issues, a way to start your game from any PC anywhere.
To give a short answer to the original poster, I reformatted the hard disk this weekend and reinstalled winxp. This is the sequence of events regarding Steam reinstallation,
1) Copied Steam folder to another hard disk.
2) After reformat and reinstallation of windowsXP, I installed Steam using the 600kByte client at http://www.steampowered.com
3) Steam updated itself with roughly 2-3 megs of data
4) I copied the *.gcf files back into the new Steam folder. These gcf files contain all the packed game content. There was one Counter Strike file (~250 meg), two half-life files (~450 meg, 10-30 meg), one steam platform file (10 meg), three HL2 preload files (2.5 GB)
5) I then logged into steam and clicked on the games. It recognized HL, Counterstrike and HL2 preload and didn't download a single byte from the internet.
6) I then disconnected from Steam and started HL in offline mode. It came up fine (I had copied the saved games as well, which were in a different directory). Now I don't need to connect to Steam, and I can remain in offline until the time I want to download a patch.
The whole process was fairly painless and in fact most of the actions above need to be performed when reinstalling a game from a CD after reformat/winxp-install as well.
>copy that I can re-install at my leisure. Reformat your
>system and have to wait for it to download all over again, no
>thanks. Even game installs can get corrupted and need to be
>uninstalled/reinstalled.
Steam has two major functionalities that work somewhat independent of each other,
1) It can authenticate your game purchase
2) It can stream games for you over the internet.
For authentication, all Steam wants is a way to connect a game to your Steam account. If you buy a boxed copy, you'll give your CD-key (*if* you want to use Steam), if you buy online, Steam already knows that you as an account holder own this game.
This authentication needs to be done just *once*.
Once Steam knows that you own a certain game, it doesn't care where you get the files from. You can,
a) Have the boxed copy
b) Have a CD or DVD backup
c) Ask a friend to copy his game files for you
d) Ask a friend to download game files for you
e) Start streaming the files on a broadband connection at a place you are visiting (maybe a friend or relative's place)
That's actually the best part about Steam. That once you have authenticated a game, there are no CD-checks, no reason to keep CD in drives, no copy protection issues, a way to start your game from any PC anywhere.
To give a short answer to the original poster, I reformatted the hard disk this weekend and reinstalled winxp. This is the sequence of events regarding Steam reinstallation,
1) Copied Steam folder to another hard disk.
2) After reformat and reinstallation of windowsXP, I installed Steam using the 600kByte client at http://www.steampowered.com
3) Steam updated itself with roughly 2-3 megs of data
4) I copied the *.gcf files back into the new Steam folder. These gcf files contain all the packed game content. There was one Counter Strike file (~250 meg), two half-life files (~450 meg, 10-30 meg), one steam platform file (10 meg), three HL2 preload files (2.5 GB)
5) I then logged into steam and clicked on the games. It recognized HL, Counterstrike and HL2 preload and didn't download a single byte from the internet.
6) I then disconnected from Steam and started HL in offline mode. It came up fine (I had copied the saved games as well, which were in a different directory). Now I don't need to connect to Steam, and I can remain in offline until the time I want to download a patch.
The whole process was fairly painless and in fact most of the actions above need to be performed when reinstalling a game from a CD after reformat/winxp-install as well.
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