Won

For other uses, see Won (disambiguation)}}}.

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, , Soldier of Fortune, Dark Reign 2 and online versions of casino games.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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to WON today on a program such as Half-Life will result in an error message, saying that you're Half-Life Executable is out of date, and will try to connect you to an update server.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. In order to resolve this, you should download Steam, and quote the registration code for your game, allowing you to download and run that game. Gamespy runs a similar service, where the user may download a freeware program allowing the user to browse for game servers.

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]

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