Jakub's Rant: Valve, Steam, and Game Center Licenses

Licensing

Note: mdk30 brought up a good point on the forums that a customer's Steam account isn't necessary for CS 1.6 to work at a net cafe. But what if the game center owners want the option?

It seems like Valve is on everybody's lips lately. Besides the continuing questions surrounding Half-Life 2, there were the source code arrests and recently Slashdot posted a story about an internet café that Valve threatened to sue unless said café bought into Valve's licensing scheme.

Now, believe it or not, we've been aware of Valve's licensing for a while. Originally, we intended to run a story pointing out that while Activision, Microsoft and others were simply content that game centers own the games they let their customers play, Valve and Blizzard have further licensing requirements. But further investigation showed that there simply was no story - neither Valve nor Blizzard really went after violators. How could they, after all? Gaming cafés are not Blockbuster, it's just not that big a business (in North America, at any rate). Plus, multiplayer gaming is a wildly different experience from a movie - multiplayer has you coming back, whereas a movie requires at most a couple of viewings until you're done with it. You can never finish Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat, thus the software doesn't lose its value like a movie after exposure.

Even that doesn't really matter in the end - the reason we didn't run the article is because there was little reason to question Valve or Blizzard's rights to charge license fees. They're quite draconian considering the hair thin margins that gaming cafes run on, but we're sure that in the future a compromise will be reached that would be equitable to the cafes and developers both. So why write about this at all?

Everyone who plays Counter-Strike at a gaming café is not only playing on the legal copy at the café, he's playing the very copy he already owns.

How can this be? Now while we're not sure about the people at Valve, but most of us who find ourselves playing Counter-Strike need to log on to a little utility called Steam. I could sing Steam's praises to heaven for a few pages, but we're not here to discuss the joys of downloading a patch off Valve's authentication service. No, the reason I bring up Steam is that it's at the very heart of the matter here - when you make a Steam ID, tied to your email account, that ID requires a CD key. A CD key by default implies ownership (or rather, the legal licensing) of a copy of Half-Life, Counter-Strike or other related game that Valve has released and thus already profited from you on.

Consider the implications of that. In order to play Half-Life or a Half-Life mod at an internet café, you already need to have a licensed copy of Half-Life and the attached CD key. Steam simply won't let you log on without a valid account, and there's no way that a café owner will give you one of his accounts, because that will get stolen and rapidly become useless.

So, in overview: Valve wants to charge game center owners for running copies of Half-Life and its mods and permitting owners of Half-Life and its mods to come play at the gaming center, for a fee. The game center has to own a copy for someone to play. A player has to own a copy to play. Just where, exactly, is the need for extra licensing?

Perhaps I'm not understanding something here. I've been wrong before - many times - and freely admit it. If there's a point on which I'm mistaken or being unclear, I welcome a representative from Valve to correct me. So Doug Lombardi, Gabe Newell, feel free to get in touch. If either of you would like to explain why Valve Software sees fit to charge gaming centers an extra licensing fee to permit gamers to play their legal licenses on the gaming center's legal installations, you know where you can contact me - look for the unanswered emails on this very subject I sent to you months ago.

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