As a large number of you may know, the support from WON.Net was phased out for SOF, however it still ran for some other games, largely in part for Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and such.

With the development and release of Valve Software's Steam, the long-abhored WON IDs were to be phased out. Although they mentioned doing away with WON after this transition, controversy in the Counter-Strike community over the move to the Steam platform prevented such a monumental change.

This is all about to change, as the entire system of WON will be shutting down by the end of this month.

According to Valve, they have been monitoring the number of users from the old version of Counter-Strike (v1.5) which used WON IDs in comparison to those who are on the updated version (Steam CS 1.6). They claim more users have moved over to Steam in the last few months and they will be discontinuing WON for good soon.

I can't say WON was worth the trouble for games like SOF, however it was pretty useful and put to good use in Counter-Strike. ID bans and anti-cheat measures probably were the main staple in keeping the ID system active in the first place, where as that was never much of a problem with SOF until later years. WON never completely caused problems with Counter-Strike as it did with SOF either, but I think it's safe to say that it's finally come to an end.

Thought it was pretty interesting, of course, it makes sense to finally let the system go if for no other reason than financial reasons. Which I'm sure that certain companies will be delighted to know, hint-hint. ;)

Thanks RedTiger for this article.