World Opponent Network or WON was an online gaming service, created by Sierra Games as the Sierra Internet Gaming System (SIGS). WON was used by games such as Homeworld, Half-Life, Star Trek: Armada, Soldier of Fortune, Dark Reign 2 and online versions of casino games. Image File history File links WON logo File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... This article or section is missing references or citation of sources. ... Half-Life For a quantity subject to exponential decay, the half-life is the time required for the quantity to fall to half of its initial value. ... Star Trek: Armada is a computer game published by Activision, based upon the Star Trek universe. ... Soldier of Fortune is a first-person shooter game created by Raven Software and published by Activision on March 27, 2000 for personal computers. ...

Sierra was purchased by Havas in January 1999 and Cendant Software became Havas Interactive, which came to control WON. In March 2000, Havas Interactive merged WON.net with Prize Central Net to form Flipside.com. Regardless, games such as Valve Software's Half-Life continued to use the service. Havas was the first French news agency, created in 1835 by Charles-Louis Havas. ... Cendant Corporation (NYSE: CD) is a New York-based provider of business and consumer services, primarily within the real estate and travel sectors. ... Valve Software is a Bellevue, Washington-based video game developer made famous by its first product, Half-Life, which was released in November 1998. ...

In 2001, Valve acquired WON from Flipside.com and began to implement the Steam system in beta form. Over the next few years, as Steam was developed and tested, WON continued to serve. Steam is a content delivery, digital rights management and multiplayer system developed by the Valve Corporation. ...

Valve shut down the last of its WON servers on July 31, 2004, officially killing the remnants of WON. All online portions of Valve's games were transferred to their own Steam system. The announcement disappointed some of the long-time Half-Life and Counter-Strike players who held it in high esteem for being, in their view, more efficient in terms of speed than Steam. July 31 is the 212th day (213th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with 153 days remaining. ... 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Steam is a content delivery, digital rights management and multiplayer system developed by the Valve Corporation. ... Counter-Strike (CS) is a popular team-based mod of Valves first-person shooter (FPS) Half-Life. ...

After the shutdown of WON, some players continue to run a patched version of the retail versions of Half-Life or Counter-Strike, which connects to a WON replacement called No-WON (or WON2), and allows users to use the original server browser to connect to Half-Life servers, and their various mods (including Counter-Strike 1.5, and a Steamless version of 1.6), just as they would before WON's shutdown. WON2 is the user-created and operated successor to the World Opponent Network (WON) online gaming service, for playing Half-Life and its mods online. ...

WON also had its fair share of problems. Some found themselves permanently banned for no apparent reason. WON also caused some connection issues in relation to servers.

Trying to connect to WON today on a program such as Half-Life will result in an error message, saying that your Half-Life Executable is out of date, and will try to connect you to an update server. This will fail and you will be unable to connect to Half-Life multiplayer games. The term Update may refer to the following: Update (SQL) - an SQL statement for changing data in records Software update The Update Computer Society is an academic computer society at Uppsala University in Sweden. ... Online gaming redirects here. ...

External links

• WON.net - old WON site
• Flipside.com
• Usenet post that reports the WON/Prize Central merger
• no-WON.net - non-Steam Counter-Strike 1.5 site
• Steamless Counter-Strike Project Site
• Won2 Sever Network
• list of WON2 servers online now