Valve's plan to control its presence in cyber cafes

As a follow-up to all the outrage over Valve's treatment of small-time cyber cafes, there is this piece of news. Valve has opted to go with Namco, Ltd. to distribute its games to cafes in Japan. Games included in the package are Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. From here on out, all cyber cafes in that country will have to go through Namco before they can offer the games to their customers. No more buying perfectly legal end-user copies and installing them on the PCs. Those days are over. Now you have to pay The Man. This may seem like a fair move if you consider that Valve works their asses off to get out good games. However, it seems counter-productive to zero in on small-time businesses, which are designed to get people hooked on your products. The general sense around here is that this move is motivated by the "bad kind" of greed — the kind that ends up shooting you in the foot. It's a complicated issue. But it could be made much less complicated if Valve were more open about this maneuver, and explained to its fans why they feel this is necessary. And don't give us that "Quality Assurance" crap. We'll see right through it.