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The service has not restricted digital downloads on other stores. EA games are available on the other digital stores. The specific problem is between EA and Steam. Valve does not allow Steam games to sell and make available DLC through their own stores; everything must go through Steam. EA doesn't want to rewrite their games to work with Steam's store (which would cost EA time/money to do and to maintain the separate Steam version, and then on top of that Valve would take a cut on every DLC), so they're at an impasse. Battlefield 3 is available on Direct2Drive, for instance.

You can also get it on Steam and D2D also with the 10% pre-order discount. The big deal about GOG having it was that it's the first time they've had a brand new game available first day in their store. Although CD Projekt owning GOG helped that. http://store.steampowered.com/app/20920/ http://www.direct2drive.com/10030/product/Buy-The-Witcher-2:-Assassins-of-Kings-Digital-Premium-Download

I can second your recommendation of gog.com - I've bought a few classic games from them, and had no trouble getting them to work (on a WinXP machine). I hadn't heard of direct2drive.com, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that they have Civilization 5 available for pre-order. Unfortunately, they don't mention DRM (which probably means that they're using it), and say that it requires Steam (with which I've had uniformly bad experiences). So, unlike GOG, I don't think I can really recommend direct2drive.

Steam is just more drm bullshit in my opinion.

I am voting with my wallet. DRM in any form, no sale.

When will these pea brains figure this out. I can just as easily pirate anything I want but I would rather pay for it and have something that doesn't need a patch or the damn cd every time I want to use it. Is it really any sweat off their asses if I want to let my kids play a game I bought? I'm not buying two copies.

FTA:
"I have gotten this same error, I believe the system may have done this to everyone who is currently playing that is using credit cards to pay... My fees were 13 charges of 6 month subscriptions, 77.94 X 13 = 1013.12 I didn't have this much money in my account, costing me any money that Icould possibly have to live off of..."

Wow... just wow. Having $1,000 suddenly deducted from your bank account would hurt almost any gamer

Warhammer Online requires a credit card on file:
"This game requires a monthly fee to play. The first 30 days of this fee are included in the purchase price of this package. You must provide a valid credit card to register and play."

So all those smart people saying "use automatic bill pay" are wrong, you can't with Warhammer Online. This is so much fail on so many levels I don't know what to say.

This is where I think Steam falls short, when indie games are offered with Steam they will also come with Steam's DRM, but through other services, they do not; e.g. http://store.steampowered.com/app/26800/ vs http://www.direct2drive.com/8106/product/Buy-Braid-Download

How is saying an app won an Android Developer Contest not irrelevant to the iPhone platform? That strikes me as the very definition of irrelevancy, because it's not the same platform.

Err, what? as the name says it's not a platform, it's a *contest*. Contests which your product has won are relevant for selling said product, that's Marketing 101. C'mon, I know the RDF is strong and all but it's not rocket science.

Should Direct2Drive remove Rome: Total Waras well for mentioning they got a Best Strategy Game 2004 award from Gamespot, and Crysis Warhead for using the GOTY award Crysis got from PC Gamer as well?

Furthermore, the original poster is pointing out that many apps in the app store today mention Android. Well you just totally blew by that one, didn't you? How do you mesh you assertion that Android is verboten when plainly it's not by the presence of counter-examples?

By asserting that the Apple censors are on crack and may reject you once then accept you once you resubmit the exact same app, simply because you got a different result on the Rejection Roulette. There's enough precedent for that, and it's also the easiest way to explain *your* assertion that mentioning a competing platform is enough grounds to reject an app, given the very same counter-examples.

How is saying an app won an Android Developer Contest not irrelevant to the iPhone platform? That strikes me as the very definition of irrelevancy, because it's not the same platform.

Err, what? as the name says it's not a platform, it's a *contest*. Contests which your product has won are relevant for selling said product, that's Marketing 101. C'mon, I know the RDF is strong and all but it's not rocket science.

Should Direct2Drive remove Rome: Total Waras well for mentioning they got a Best Strategy Game 2004 award from Gamespot, and Crysis Warhead for using the GOTY award Crysis got from PC Gamer as well?

Furthermore, the original poster is pointing out that many apps in the app store today mention Android. Well you just totally blew by that one, didn't you? How do you mesh you assertion that Android is verboten when plainly it's not by the presence of counter-examples?

By asserting that the Apple censors are on crack and may reject you once then accept you once you resubmit the exact same app, simply because you got a different result on the Rejection Roulette. There's enough precedent for that, and it's also the easiest way to explain *your* assertion that mentioning a competing platform is enough grounds to reject an app, given the very same counter-examples.

Even from Direct2Drive, whom I prefer by a little, you download the actual CD image/executable and back it up, and have a CD key mailed to you. Oh, and you have refunds.

Yup, they sure do. It's right there in their Terms of Service:

Refund Policy. Certain restrictions apply to sales of Products sold through the Service that might not otherwise apply to physical goods. Refunds will not be issued due to your dissatisfaction with the Product or if your computer does not meet the minimum Product requirements. If you feel you qualify for a refund please contact Customer Service. Refunds or credits will be issued solely at IGN's discretion. Refunds may be offered if all the following conditions are met:

• The time of your request for refund/credit is fewer than 48 hours from time of purchase
• The game has not been activated
• The game activation key has not been disclosed to you by email or webpage
• We find your request reasonable due to special circumstances

So... If you had bought Batman:AA from Direct2Drive, received the activation key, activated it and then played it for about an hour, how much of a refund would you expect? Perhaps you believe that "The game SUCKS!" qualifies as special circumstances and not mere "dissatisfaction with the Product"?

Please, tell us more about this world you live in.

Here are the system specs for BioShock, my system meets their min. sys. req. and here are the req. for R6 Vegas, my video card meets their min. sys. req. and my cpu is barely under, I didn't check the other games. There may be a couple games I can't play but there are 1000's I can.

I think it is just that. There have been a few posts on /. about it. The general concensus seems to be that $10.00 is below the mark of caring for a lot of people and if they can get 2 or 3 hours out of it then it was worth it, and if they can't then no big deal. The creature editor will come as part of the game too, so you don't have to buy both, it is just also made available separatly for people that want to try it out early. If $10.00 is too much for you then you can get the preorder bundle for $54.95 which efectively reduces the price of the Creature Creator to $5.00 if you planned to buy Spore any way.

Not that it'll ever come out, but the point is there

Please look into things before you run your mouth, the release date for Spore is September 8th, 2008, and it can already be pre-ordered on Direct2Drive.

The PC version runs fine on my Asus G1S after I updated the NVidia graphics drivers like they said

The interesting thing is you can download it from here

http://www.direct2drive.com/

There is only one - once you play it you will not waste your time with any other FPS - thats if you don't poopy with being owned as a noob:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=tribes+venge ance

Buy it here:

http://www.direct2drive.com/98/product/Buy-Tribes: -Vengeance-Download

No word of a lie - best $20 you will ever spend... plus multiplay is free, no fees!

They've released Atari 2600 compilations for consoles and Windows. You can usually find them pretty cheap for example here.

Now for Commodore 64 - nothing on the legal side I guess, but this site has been around forever:

ftp://arnold.c64.org/pub/games/

Steam's offerings are growing. Aside from the normal Valve software you can purchase games like Dangerous Waters, Darwinia and Space Empires IV.
Direct 2 Drive has a much larger selection of games including recent full blown titles like Hitman Blood Money and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. I'm not exactly sure why people would pay for games this way as the price is the same as a store bought one.
Stardock's Totalgaming.net offers full games for purchase, including Galactic Civilizations 2. While a number of the games are smaller, indie releases, there are some older titles from large publishers.
Direct distribution may be in it's infancy and mostly focused on smaller or independant games, but there are definately some companies on the PC side trying to make it work.

While Kotick has a bright outlook, he sees 'full downloadable games' as being 'so far in the future that it's almost incomprehensible.'

> One of the most publicized occurrences was with BMX XXX - Wal-Mart didn't want to sell it because of its nature, so they toned it down to fit within Wal-Mart standards

A game that probably would have been better off never written at all. Sincerely, toned down or not it was a bad game that was panned by every last publication that ever saw it.

Wal-Mart is becoming irrelevant as online distribution takes hold. Civ IV and Oblivion were available from Direct2Drive on the day of their release -- often it's the only place you can find the game when it's flown off the shelves (which admittedly proves that physical distribution isn't going away soon). Other options available to publishers include Steam and Stardock. Pretty nascent stuff right now, but I give it 3 years for it to be the norm.

I propose that the pussilanimity of publishers (you may now wipe your monitor off) has other origins than wal-mart. Most of these "AAA" list games, whatever the hell that term really means, are simply installments of a sequel franchise, and thus risk-averse. God of War, an extremely violent title still sold well in the meantime, and sold at Wal-Mart.

This is probably the best way to go about things, but only if you also let the publisher know why you will not be purchasing their precious game.

The part that really pisses me off is that you never know what copy protection scheme is on a game without doing a lot of research first. Would it be so terribly difficult if you told us "Hey, Rainbow Six: Lockdown utilizes Starforce?" before we purchase it? It's a bitch to return things, and if you made the mistake (as I did) of purchasing from direct2drive.com, then there's no way they will offer a refund. I guess I DID install it, but the moment after that Starforce shit came up, and I did some research, I decided I was not interested in playing a game that contained that protection scheme. But, it was too late. There goes 50$ that I'll never be able to get back. Admittedly, I guess I should have done research beforehand, but there's something dreadfully wrong with the world when you have to google for hours before you can be relatively sure a company isn't going to proper-fuck you somehow. All I ask for is an inconspicuous label that says "Warning: This Product Will Stick Things In Your Butt" and then list the details below it. Then I can decide whether I'm okay with this probing or not so much a fan.

I recently purchased EverQuest 2 through the Direct2Drive service. I figured an MMO was relatively safe since I wouldn't need to deal with any of the weird DRM that most Direcr2Drive games require to be installed. The big problem was delivery of the game files. At least for EverQuest 2, in order to download the files I paid for I had to use the FilePlanet servers and a proprietary download program. The real problem is that unless you are a FilePlanet subscriber you can't use the "no wait" servers AND ads are displayed by the download application for the duration of the download. Now you can minimize the application and use your computer, but every couple minutes when the ad changes the application will pop up into the middle of your screen. The only way to stop this from happening is to subscribe to FilePlanet to disable the ads (keep in mind this is to download a program I PAID for, not a demo). Additionally, you can't just leave the download going overnight because the download app has a habit of timing out the connection, in which case the download needs to be manually resumed. I spent an exciting 3 hours watching the bits come down and had to resume the download more than 20 times.
I can understand problems with downloads timing out as the Internet is far from perfect, however forcing a paying customer to watch ads while the product they bought is being downloaded just boggles my mind.
I thought the Steam install process was much better although I waited until a couple weeks after Half Life 2's launch before using it. Just wish I could figure out how to install Steam programs on some drive other than C:.

"'PC gaming used to take up the entire store,' said Ken Levine, president and creative director for Irrational Games. 'Now PC gaming get's a tiny little shelf. Literally you have a fraction of the shelf space."

Meh, I buy/download every game I can via direct2drive. Hopefully, in the future, there won't even be a tiny little shelf for PC games. And as more consoles go online, in the future game stores themselves might go extinct. And, maybe they'll even drop the prices due to lower cost to distribute... yeah, well, maybe not.

No "Digital Rights Management" type scheme. Once you download it, it's yours to put on any computer you own.

I bought Swat 4 from direct2drive.com a few days ago. Cost $19.99 which is pretty cheap - and they *regularly* drop prices on their games - provided you are willing to wait a while.
It took me about an hour to download the 800 megs from fileplanet.

In my book this is far more convenient.

There is no holdup...and very little DRM crap..

http://www.direct2drive.com/
http://www.steampowered.com/

-Sj53

Steam is the only direct-to-consumer internet-based game delivery service.

That's not true.

A Steam-like service might not be ideal for small developers, though, as it would take a sizable investment in bandwidth. What might happen is a new trend in smaller online publishers that take a significantly smaller portion of profits for the service of providing the bandwidth and trusted client through which to distribute games.

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