WON.net

» see won.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i played counter-strike at internet cafes in ankara around 2003. that put me on WON.net without me ever picking the name out of a menu. WON was the matchmaking layer behind half-life and its mods, the silent infrastructure that found you a server and kept your handle. nobody i knew said WON out loud. you launched the game and you got a list of servers.

sierra built it as the sierra internet gaming system in 1997 and rebranded it WON when it left beta on april 13 1998. by then valve had a publishing deal with sierra for half-life. when half-life shipped in november 1998 and went on to sell more than ten million copies, WON became the spine of the most-played fps on the planet. counter-strike, which started as a half-life mod, lived on top of WON too.

in march 2002 valve walked into GDC and announced steam. sierra and vivendi found out at the same time everyone else did. valve had been building a competing service in secret for a year, on top of the publishing deal that funded their own studio. when steam went into beta, every valve title got patched to require it, and WON started bleeding users into a service vivendi did not own.

by the time WON's last valve servers shut on july 31 2004, i had moved off internet cafes to ttnet broadband at home and counter-strike: source was already on steam. i never noticed the migration. that was the trick of WON. it ran the game and then disappeared while you weren't looking.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

WON was a server directory plus a matchmaking layer with a friends list bolted on. you could see who was online and hop into their server. for late-90s pc gaming it was the only thing standing between you and a clean lan-party experience over a 56k line. the alternative was typing IP addresses you'd copied off a forum.

nothing about WON was visible the way steam is visible now. it had no storefront, no library, no avatar pictures. it was a auth check and a server browser that you saw for two seconds before the game launched, and that was the entire UX. steam later took the same job and built a department store on top of it.

~ the steam ambush ~

valve's secret build of steam came out of nowhere at GDC 2002. sierra and vivendi, who owned WON at the time, learned about steam at the same press conference everyone else did. valve had been writing the replacement for the publisher's product for a year. then valve patched its games to require steam, and the user base they'd built on WON had nowhere to go but along.

vivendi sued valve over the surprise. the case went on for two years and ended with valve keeping steam and the WON-era publishing relationship effectively dissolving. by then it didn't matter. the players were already on steam.

~ what it left ~

the steam catalog you launch today inherits one specific WON-shaped lesson: own the auth and the patcher, and the publisher cannot ever shut you off again. valve learned that lesson by watching what could have happened to themselves if they hadn't. WON's death is the reason steam exists in the form it does. that's the kind of inheritance only old infrastructure leaves behind.

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