LAN Centres in UK to pay more licence for CS?

[CyberDrac]

Shock! Horror!

Spotted on CS Nation (http://csnation.counter-strike.net) which links to iGamesUK (http://www.iguk.org/?a=post&id=40633).

Quote:

"The end of CS 1.6 in iGames Leagues?
Posted by Dom (iGuK) @ 17:24 GMT, 22 Oct 2003 - iMsg, Reply (Major News: VGA)

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Valve have recently released details of LAN gaming centres having to pay a license fee for their titles, including Counter-Strike. Gaming centres have already bought Half Life and Counterstike for each of their PCs, but now Valve want centres to pay thousands of pounds in additional fees. The majority of Publishers and Developers support the LAN gaming scene because of our vast marketing and promotional benefits and provide us with free licenses to operate.

As such, iGames will be withdrawing all activities, leagues and tournaments for Counterstrike 1.6 at the end of this current season. Instead, we will concentrate on our other leagues which receive promotion and support from the games publishers, such as Electronic Arts, Novalogic, Ubisoft and Microsoft.

We have just agreed a new sponsorship deal with Microsoft to run single and teamplay leagues and tournaments for Halo on PC. This will bring thousands of pounds worth of prizes to gamers all over the country, playing in iGames centres.

How this effects national and international tournaments like the World Cyber Games we will have to wait and see. Already discussions between some organisers and other publishers are underway to replace CS with alternative team based games as organisers fear that there will be no where to hold qualifiers, which are historically held in LAN gaming centres. "

[afty]

Wow. STOP THE PRESS. Valve in stupid decision shocker.

I'm willing to stake my car on the fact that Valve don't have a *SINGLE* employee in a senior position with an IQ higher than Flipper.

[Badcrumble]

I work in 2 gaming centers one of which is the biggest igames center in the uk and this sux, as weve just got CS working and our buisness is going to suffer from this a lot. I just hope the students from the chinese collage down the road are willing to learn a new game.

[Mamacita]

Oh, shame, CYA CS!

Unlucky for gaming centers tho :|

[JeRkY]

could you not revert back to 1.5?

[Badcrumble]

We have as steam +human conatct = death, but even if were 1.5ing it up the new licensing will still apply me thinks.

[afty]

Originally posted by Badcrumble
I just hope the students from the chinese collage down the road are willing to learn a new game.

Wow, dude, forget that. You could make more money by joining a carnival with these guys as a freak sideshow. Guys who can get up out of a collage? That's dynamite.

[Badcrumble]

rofl

[Moo^]

Valve really have no idea ;/

[OverlordRob]

new license wont apply to 1.5 i dont think as they have no way of enforcing it ...where as 1.6 LAN youre gonna have to buy

[Excalibur]

valve has turned into one of those age old corporations that suffer with the problem of the head not knowing what the body is doing.

[zhardoum]

I can tell you the exact prices on thsi one, I manage a Lan games shop, and I ended up with valve on my case. heres how and why.

When CS 1.6 came out, as in finally released (no longer beta) I installed it in the shop, however I found it was taking around 12 minutes to start a game and that basically it was strangling the pc's resources, So i posted a note on Steampowered's forums stating I ran a lan shop and needed specific help in configuring steam (hiding serial numbers etc etc).

I was pleasantly surprised to find in my inbox the next day an email from Mike Dunkle who works for Valve / Steam not offering any help but "Insisting I demonstrate legal ciber licences" or suffer the hand of god.

I sent him a copy of our licences and that was the end of it, never did receive any support though!. But i did speak to him on the telephone at some length and enquired how the new licences work.

Here is how the licence system works for cibers.

A home user pays for the game, (Hl Generations for example) they pay about 20 quid odd, im not sure exact retail), and included in that purchase is the updates for the game. That game being HL, Opp force and Counter Strike.

Here is the difference for Cibers, we are expected to pay 108 pounds a year per licence, each licence may only be used once per PC, that in turn legally entitles us to all Steam/valve products for ever, as long as we pay that yearly fee.

If Steam bring out a new game, it is included, when HL2 comes out, its included, as well as "Special support" as they call it, in other words if one of the serial numbers is discovered and used by a customer at home, then we have a hotline we can call and they will immediately cancel the old serial and issue a new one.

however it doesn't take a genius to work out that where I have 40 pcs, multiply that by 108 = 4320 pounds a year.

Ok, thats a fair bit of cash...

Escpecially when you consider that this "Licence" scheme has just been created, under the old licence scheme we paid 30 pounds per licence, and we were able under the licence scheme to use 1 licence 5 times on the internal network and three times on the internet, in other words to cover the complete shop I have in the backoffice 14 copies of Half life generations, Ciber cafe edition which costs me 14 * 30 = 420 pounds a year.

So, under old system we paid 420, new system 4320.

Hmm,

So, I decided that since the old HL generations was still available I would buy more of those rather than the new steam licences..

Why..? Well very simply Half life Generations has 3 Licence keys in the box, HL, Opp force & Cs, opp force is no good, but the HL and CS keys both work seperately. So in effect I get 2 keys per box, which I can use on 2 pc's for steam, which costs me 15 pounds per machine per year and not 108 pounds as steam are asking for.

And yes this is perfectly legal.


But that is the exact pricing, the prices exclude VAT and there are also a few administration charges on top, but now you see how the system works.

[PK - LoneWolf]

zhardoum unfortunately things have changed.

I manage the centre that BadCrumble works at and have recently gone through the whole debacle with IGUK over steam.

The licence you get in the box with any Half Life bought of the shelf, the EULA, is from Vivendi the publushers/owners of Half Life. The EULA covers you to make commercial gain from the HL content aslong as you own the copy running on any and all machines.

This new commercial licence is from Valve for use of Steam to make a commercial gain. Vivendi from what I understand have been cut clean out of the equation.

All commercial licensing of Valve software is done directly with Valve
Corporation. Products currently in the cyber café program are:

Counter-Strike
Deathmatch Classic
Day of Defeat
Half-Life
Half-Life Deathmatch
Ricochet
Team Fortress Classic
(coming in November - Counter-Strike:Condition Zero)

IMPORTANT: Retail software does not include a license to use the
product for commercial cyber café use.

That was cut from one of the private forum boards in the IGUK website. IT also covers all versions of these titles even those that predate steam. Valve are changing the way they do business and its a dangerous omen too.

All other publushers are happy enough for you to make money from their games aslong as you actually buy a copy for every PC its going to run on. If however Valves thinking takes off and others follow it will herald the death of LAN centres. It could even go as far as say Logitech saying that as you are making a commercial gain by allowing people to play games in your centre on their equipment that they intend to introduce a charge for it. Its wrong and it goes against everything that the industry has done in recent years to improve its image.

Valve are doing the dirty on us all. Current pricing is $10 per PC per month so for my centre if our original plan was to go ahead it would mean $10x80PC'sx12months = $8160 a year or in our money £4834. We also have reason to believe though nothing has been "officially" confirmed that HL2 could be pay to play over steam making it the potentially the largest MMOFPS with no background storyline, persistant world or frankly reason to play.

My vote role on Doom 3 or Quake 4

[afty]

I am not a lawyer, but I'm fairly certain that this is not legal...

If you buy a product from Vivendi which entitles you to use it in a Cyber Cafe, Valve cannot retroactively cancel that license unless Vivendi were illegally distributing the product....

Of course, you may have to agree to new licensing terms in order to install the 1.6 Patch - however if Valve prevents older clients from engaging in Internet Play without Steam auth, then I suggest this is also challengeable in court - they cannot suddenly prevent a product from working as advertised because it suits their commercial needs to do so in order to force a licence change upon users.

[PK - LoneWolf]

In that respect you are pretty much right. There has never been a recorded case of a publisher taking a centre to court for making money from games it owns copies for. However Valve once again change the goal posts and find a clever and yet suitably annoying way around this. Support or the ability to see servers running 1.5 or previous will dissappear. I am not sure how they will do this but this is what is apprently going to happen. In effec though your assesment was spot on by agreeing to run 1.6 you have to agree to a new set of terms ergo the new cost to all centres. The other bit is that most of not all games include in their EULA a bit that states that no unautorised commercial gain may be made with the respective product.

[afty]

Originally posted by PK - LoneWolf
The other bit is that most of not all games include in their EULA a bit that states that no unautorised commercial gain may be made with the respective product.

I already questioned the legality of changing the terms with a patch (tbh I think they might get away with that in court) but I'm pretty sure clauses like "You may not make any money off our product" in general terms such as that are, in fact, unenforceable (in the UK at least). I believe companies are allowed to specify specific terms (you may not show this in public, you may not lease this) but may not exclude all possible uses with such a general term.

Finally, it's easy enough to use legalease to get around this, just hire a half-competent lawyer to draft the terms of the service for your "cafe" which basically state that the user is paying a flat fee for access to, for example, bandwidth or power, or the PC itself - and that the presence of games or other software on PCs besides the OS/Internet Explorer is not guaranteed... That way you're NOT making commercial gain from Counter Strike, it just happens to be there...
This might preclude advertising a competition with CS in it for example, but would almost certainly get you around the fees.