Valve and VU Settle Lawsuit; Valve Goes Solo for Distribution

They settle their differences, but the parting isn't exactly on amicable terms.

Valve and Vivendi Universal Games today announced the settlement of a long and bitter legal feud, which started by Valve filing a federal court lawsuit back in August 2002.

Under the settlement agreement, VU Games will stop distributing Valve games, including Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and all the Counter-Strike retail variants, effective August 31, 2005.

In addition, only Valve is authorized to distribute Valve games to cyber cafes--Internet cafe licensing agreements for Valve games distributed under VU Games will now be terminated.

The legal battle started from VU Games' discontentment with Valve's online distribution service Steam, which allows users to purchase and play Valve games directly through the developer and not the retail distributor. Unspoken tensions festered as both sides gave conflicting announcements regarding Half-Life 2's release--and ultimately was delayed by the infamous source code leak by a year.

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