Slashdot Mirror
Gaming On Demand
hetfield writes: "Cruising around today, I found this. Run by Electronics Boutique, EB1 allows you to rent PC/Windows games on demand. Five bucks gets you 72 hours with a few fairly new titles, which are streamed to your hard drive using a client called IntoPlayer. If you decide to buy the boxed game later, you can copy the save files over and continue right where you left off, according to the FAQ. These are FULL games, not demos. Modem users need not apply for the service, however."
Unless these people have cleared it with the software publishers, they're going to face copyright liability. Even if they've bought all the copies of the games they're renting out, they're still violating copyright law. There's a specific provision in 17 USC Section 109 (b) (1) that prohibits renting computer programs (that aren't video games or otherwise embedded), despite first sale doctrine rights that adhere to other kinds of copyrighted works (like video rentals, books, audio tapes, etc.) "Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a), unless authorized by the owners of copyright in the sound recording or the owner of copyright in a computer program (including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such program), and in the case of a sound recording in the musical works embodied therein, neither the owner of a particular phonorecord nor any person in possession of a particular copy of a computer program (including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such program), may, for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage, dispose of, or authorize the disposal of, the possession of that phonorecord or computer program (including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such program) by rental, lease, or lending, or by any other act or practice in the nature of rental, lease, or lending."
Into Networks...based in Cambridge. The are the creators of the IntoPlayer and they have the rights to all the games that they offer. So no worry about lawsuits. try going to www.playnow.com. that is their store front. as far as copying the game goes..im sure someone will find out how to do it. but, it doesnt stream the whole game at one time. it sends little blocks of encrypted info little by little. sends it,loads it,plays it, removes what it has, then asks for more. i know a lot more info on this but not sure what i can tell the public. its a very interesting setup though and im sure that Into could make a fortune off of this...right now they are struggling though. just a few months ago they had big layoffs..::sigh:: :) . as far as game spped and quality goes.. it feels like you're playing it straight off of your hard drive. some things do delay though. i know UT has a big delay in the beginning loading screen but after that its flawless.
It's been this way for years: cheap, bug-free, or available. If you're lucky, pick two. Software project management guru types will tell you that the time for a release date isn't 100% bug free -- it's 90% bug free. That last 10% takes so long to find and fix that by the time your product is to market, it won't be relevant. Sure, they could delay games for even longer (B&W took three years already!), or they could charge $500, and you could have a bug free product at release.
As it is, wait six months or so after the initial ship date, and there'll be patches bringing the game up to perfection. And, those of us who want to play with the neat stuff right away can, with the understanding that it's probably not actually final.
Or, wait a year, and buy it for half the release price. Or wait two and buy it for $10.
(Obopensource aside: things work slightly differently if you're releasing all along, but the basic principles apply. This is why Mozilla isn't at 1.0 yet, but Netscape 6.0 came out forever ago.)
Anyone else remember a service delivered by the cable company that brought on-demand games to the Sega Genesis? The cable company out here in Vegas, Prime Cable at the time, had this service for around 2 years if I can remember that only cost $4.95/month on top of the cable subscription that gave you access to like 40 Genesis games on-demand. They had most of the popular games and even if a little slow on updating their system, they usually had the "new" ones in a reasonable amount of time too. As far as hardware, it was just an adapter that plugged in like a game and had a connection to the cable line. If I remember right, they eventually shut down the service because of lack of demand. Talk about a few years too soon... I know I'd easily fork out that 5 or 10 bucks a month now to get on-demand games for my dreamcast or ps2...
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
The first version of this that I saw was a modified Mattel Intellivision, and all the games were standard Intellie games. The game selector with the Intellivision font was cool though.
Thought I'd also point out that renting software is illegal according to the copyright act:
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
To add to the points you brought up:
Hardcore gamers will go out and buy the game, casual gamers will rent once or twice a month. Maybe, but how much buffering is there?? Even on cable broadband, the access can get awful slow, especially at peak times. In addition, as more services start eating up this bandwidth, it just keeps getting slower. If the casual gamer finds that there is a 10 minute or greater wait for the buffering, kiss it goodbye.
In addition, why rent Quake?? In a few days you might get past the area where the demo ends?? This is true for most games. The demo usually has the first few levels, and that's really all you could get through in 72 hours.
Imagine renting B&W, you'd get nowhere in that game during the rental time...
And on the hacking front, when they start combatting cracking on the system, it will most likely involve software updates that will have to be downloaded every time. This will add to the delay of getting in the game, will most likely require a reboot, and will generally make people ticked.
Heck, you wanna spend less on games, join a trading ring. "Have you finished Diablo II?? Wanna trade for my copy of BG II???" With 7-8 guys, it comes out to 4-5$ a game anyway....
Dude. As far as difficulty settings are concerned, I was checking out the service, not trying to prove that I'm a 'l33t qu4k3 d00d' (which I am...*wink*). I agree that 72 hours won't work for many games (RPG's are a good example.) I spent over 200 hours on FFVII over a couple monthes when it came out.
/needed/ to on my HD. Saints be praised!
But it's so obvious that the people who built the service understand that there are many different pricing models. I didn't mention it in my first post in detail, but one of the links on the service page (the link said "my stuff") was "Manage Subscriptions", so it seems that someone there is aware that people may want to play this stuff for more than a weekend. I didn't see any options to subscribe to anything, but like most new things, they're probably just trying out different pricing schemes, or maybe Electronics Boutique only wants video-tape-like rentals. The service has been up for what? A couple days? You can bet it's going to change as more people use it and the companies involved get more feedback. (If they're smart, they're reading this and any other forum where people are yacking about it.)
It would be awesome if I could subscribe to a piece of software and if a patch came out I wouldn't have to do anything, it just updates automatically. The service provider has to worry about updating their content, but I don't have to keep track of patches.
This is a good idea. Like I said in my first post, I'll always pay more for simplicity and convenience, and I think I'm an average user. Sure there was a time when I was a hardcore gamer, and wanted to get into the guts of my system and hand-hack everything to optimum perfection. I've overclocked and bios hacked, and hex edited games for fun and profit, but these days I've got other things on my mind and don't want to spend my time managing all that. I think the people behind this know that most of us want something that just works and doesn't need to be managed.
Imagine what would happen if you could use more than games on this system. Imagine if there was a link on my online banking service where I could fire up Quicken, or MS-Money. That would be sweet! I could telecommute to work and not have to install any apps beforehand since they'll just stream down to my PC as I need them. IT people might love this! Sure makes setting up a PC easy.
Good god! [Insert huge gasp] What would the world come to if I could use only the parts of MS-office that are actually useful?!?! Since I never actually use 95% of the menu options, does that mean that I'll never stream them down to my machine? This could mean that MS-office wouldn't take up any more room that it
They're almost banking on the laziness of the average user...not a bad bet in my book. *grin*
-UT
Tried it out ($5...big deal I'll always pay more for convenience). The verdict: Not 100% perfect at my bandwidth (540kb adsl) but very /very/ cool.
Purchase Details:
You start at EB's Flash driven site, and when you rent you get a HUGE license agreement. After you agree you bounce to a site the has the game ("Serious Sam", a fp-shooter in my case) and a link to download the "IntoPlayer" (Funky power button logo combined with the letter "I"). I downloaded the player from "www.intonetworks.com" (feels like the RealPlayer without all the "Big Brother is watching" corporate schtick,) and it bounced me back to the game page. The button that had said to get the player now displayed a rental offer for $4.99 for 72 hours. There wasa link for me to check "System requirement" which ran some test that told me that I had directX 7 installed and that everything was cool. I clicked the offer and paid my money (Visa, and I had to create an account, so I assume this will facilitate future purchases.) After some processing it sent me to a page that had a play button, there was also a link to "My Titles" and various account managment links. It looks like you can maintain a library of software online.
Play Details:
When you click the play button, the IntoPlayer comes up and a bunch of message zipped past in a little dialog, then a progress bar and timer told me that my title would be ready in 20 minutes. It was bringing down about 90 meg of the game (so says the progress bar) and the game would start when the transfer finished. There was a check box you could select to make the game ask you before starting up. 25 minutes later (close enough estimate for me) the game started up. Everything seemed normal. I did notice on subsequent runs of the game that the loading time was almost nil...caching?
I couldn't tell any difference between playing a game locally and playing it this way except for load times. The games was level based, and at each new level there was about 2 minutes of load time. I suppose this would change if I had more bandwidth. The actual in game play was superb! I finished the game (on the easy setting) this morning and have about 36 hours left on my rental. Pretty sweet for $5! Load times are a small price to pay for not shelling out $60 for a game you'll finish in a weekend.
This has awesome potential. It's convenient and simple. I like not having to screw with installations.
Other notes: There's some sort of caching going on. I Saved multiple times, and when I went back to an old save there was almost no access on my dsl modem. I think it saves the data locally.
Very, very cool. This thing can only get better as bandwidth improves and the companies involved get more saavy about this space.
-UT
>Paying for software? Come on this is the Linux age. Software wants to be free.
>I have a personal policy, ignore software restrictions whenever I see them.
>GPL, who cares! MS EULA, who cares!
Unlike almost all GPL'd software, games contain a large amount of data as well program code. It is mainly for this that you are paying when you hand over your money at the counter.
I mean, a lot of games companies now are starting to realise that opening up the source code is a Good Thing, but what good is a game without maps/textures/models?
Have you seen the quality of home-coded GPL'd games? They just CAN'T compete with commercial games. They don't have the resources that a properly-funded commercial games house has at its disposal.
imho, you should pay money where money is due
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Those on modems... Personally I would be reluctant to install anything which is going to stream data onto my hard drives especially with all these articles surrounding privacy, cookies, etc. Last time I played a game over PC was about 2 years back which was Q2, but FYI, many gaming companies place demos on cd's in magazines, and many gaming companies have demos on their sites.
IMHO this service is probably going to allow rampant piracy to occur since the full game is downloadable. It's only a certain amount of time before cracks start appearing all over AstaLaVista, and then the companies will wonder why.
If I did play games, personally I would rather go out and buy it in a store, this way I can get out of my house for one, secondly I can get the whole box complete with graphics, instructions, etc.
Want Root?
from the concept of my lending a friend the actual CD? I ask because as I recall, that behaviour was termed "piracy" by that industry anti-piracy association, and such corporate wonders as Microsoft themselves.
In fact, according to this item on the MS website, this IS piracy.
Software piracy also occurs when someone makes more copies than permitted, or when, for example, he or she borrows a copy of a program from someone else.
It is supposed to be a full-version that arrives on your desktop, right? So that does sound like I will be "borrowing a copy from someone else.", right? So why is it is that when that someone else is a large corporation this is classified as renting, and is legal but my lending the CD is *wrong*/*evil*/*illegal*/immoral*/pick your term..
It's nice to know that if money is to be made that it's legal.. Guess from now on I'll have my friends drop a $0.25 piece on my kitchen table as they leave with the CD..
Most countries have laws that allow you to swap products of purchase within days, for instance 10 days in Norway. In cases of REALLY bad games, eg Wing Commander 2 looked nothing like it did on the package, I've returned the game and gotten another. If you've broken seals, you're at the mercy of the store though, unless the game is really unplayable on your computer. Some lame kids use this to pirate games, so your mileage may vary from store to store. However, too many people accept too buggy and unplayable games without returning them IMHO. I suspect it has relation with too much money in their pockets, or being afraid to assert their rights in person.
;*)
B&W was a huge disappointer. Maybe I'll continue it later, but I will never buy into hype of this magnitude again. I said so about Ultima 9 too, so maybe I should shut up *bonks head really hard*
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Surely EB is paying the game publishers money for the right to do this (either a cut per game or some lump sum).
If they weren't doing this then they would have a LOT more games available. So, EB makes a little money for streaming out the game and the publisher makes a little money as well.
Also I haven't looked into it but it looks like the content is streamed somewhat like a WMP stream, using pre-caching of content. It may not be easily to get a local cache of the ENTIRE game (since content is sent on demand), so although nothing is impossible, it would be very difficult to pirate the game.
if there was a free game that I could test the system with. I wouldn't want to pay $4.99 to find out that it really blows, or waste part of the 72 hours configuring my firewall to make this work.
I've rented scratched Playstation titles before. But I can't imagine renting a PC game that has as many inherent problems that many recent games do.
Of course this would be great for some games for which there can be no "demo" version. I usually realize the game I just bought was a lemon about an hour after removing the shrink-wrap.
After paying $50 for B/W I didn't even have the will to get to world 4 to discover the problem. I hated myself that much for buying it.
Renting PC titles may mean more talk of violent videogames causing murders- like the recent "fragfest" in Nepal.
Everyone seems to be talking about how easy this will be to pirate. I think the solution is fairly obvious:
.NET programs *should* be difficult to crack.
Buffer the parts of the game that, if delayed, would slow down gameplay (textures, sounds, etc). Leave much of the logic on the server. This will allow for a responsive gaming experience while keeping key parts of the code away from crackers. It can be fairly trivial to crack "offline" forms of copy protection, but if the crackers need to rewrite entire AI routines, I think they'll look elsewhere. You can't crack code that you don't have.
BTW, this is the same reason why
"Saddam Hussein cavorts with terrorists."
A much "lower-tech" version of this was tried on cable over 20 years ago. I can remember the ads. You paid a subscription fee and got a special game console that connected to the cable system. I never knew anyone who ever tried it, so I have no idea how good it was, but I guess that's the point: Very few tried it.
I can't see how this will succeed any more than pay-per-view has. Some people will use it, but I find that most people evaluate games by seeing them on their friends' computers, then go out and buy the game if they like it. And if none of their friends have the game, they download a demo. Considering that most games cost in the $30-$40 range, renting the game more than once or twice gets rather expensive relative to the retail price. I'd imagine that the hard-core gamers will prefer to buy, and casual gamers will only rent once or twice a month. And with broadband stilll only used by a minority of Net users, their potential market is going to be limited for a while.
And, as others have already stated, this thing is going to be hacked. Then the race between the cracks and the security patches begins. If they can't keep the system reasonably secure, game publishers aren't going to make their titles available, and the only way this has a chance of succeeding is if it has a massive library of games to choose from.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
If I want to evaluate a game, I'll download the demo. If I decide I like it, then I want it on a nice shiny CD I can reinstall with as many times as I like. Why would I want to download game data over and over again to play the full game for more than a few days? And if I just want to evaluate, why would I want to download the full game, even streaming, when I could grab a demo in a half hour via cable access?
I'm the stranger...posting to