Valve pushing CyberCafe Program with new games
by Kit

Wednesday, July 7 2004

Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source to support Cybercafe program.

Valve Corporation today revealed a series of new games and features being added to the Valve Cybercafé Program over the coming months.

Effective immediately, subscribers of the Valve Cybercafe Program will receive a free license to use Xbox versions of Valve's games in their cafés, up to the number of active cybercafe subscriptions held in the Valve Cybercafe Program.

In similar fashion, Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 will be added to the program for active subscribers in the Valve Cybercafe Program. These new games will be included as part of the regular monthly fee as soon as they are released.

"Valve has a long tradition of developing award-winning action games, online technologies and services for our individual customers," said Gabe Newell, Valve president and founder. "As we prepare for the launch of our next generation content and services, we are eager to extend that tradition to our Cybercafe partners by developing features and content that will make it easier to administer Valve games in a Cybercafe setting and provide compelling games for their customers. We are hoping to hear feedback from the Cybercafes so we can continue to improve the program and better understand how we can best support our subscribers."

In addition to the new games, Valve is also readying a Cybercafe License Server. Among other features, the Cybercafe License Server will allow café's to manage their licenses on a concurrent user basis, locally update individual computers on a café's local area network (reducing bandwidth needs for updates), and allow individual users with personal Steam accounts to access their account on any computer station located at a cybercafé site.

Active Valve Cybercafe Program subscribers receive access and a commercial license to use Valve games in their café (including Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Day of Defeat and Half-Life), access to upcoming new releases in the program such as Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source, free tournament licenses, promotional materials and priority customer service and support. To find out more information and subscribe today, please visit http://steampowered.com/index.php?area=cybercafes.

--- Kit