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Games on Demand
Laurens Simonis writes "Yesterday, the Dutch ISP Planet Internet introduced a games subscription service. For a small monthly fee, about $10, you get unlimited access to a growing list of (sort-of) current games which you can legally download from them. Currently, you can pick from 20 titles including Tomb Raider Chronicles, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare and Commandos 2. New ones are added monthly. To my knowledge, this is the first time an ISP offers this kind of service. Personally, I'm all for the idea. Could this be the future? Half-Life developer Valve Software seems to think so." This looks really cool, but I'm curious as to how well it will catch on. It feels about 5 years too early to me, but here's hoping it performs well.
For someone that wants to pop on and play a game casually, this is great.
But for the hardcore gamer, I think they'd prefer to have the game in hand.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Now this news shows me how much I should appraciate my 56k.
"Since P2P consumes our bandwidth anyway, we may as well provide the games ourselves and make a buck in the process".
Smart move though.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Can I assume that Tetris is the only game not on the restricted list?
Given that I generally play a good game for at least a year, I'd hate to drop $120 on it. Although it'd be nice to have only spent $10 on something like Neverwinter Nights.
- Consult the dictionary frequently to avoid mispelling
So let me get this streight. I pay you $10 for a $40 game.
And I can download all the other games too!
Even if you just want one game it pays off.
Something is missing here. How would a company make money like this.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Unfortuneately, there has to be tolerance to piracy built into the policy or it won't work.
If you download a game, you have the install media. It's a simple matter of building a app or a device to circumvent the copy protection it has at that point. There are no hardware controls like broken CD specs built into this kind of system, so I can't see it depending on hardware copy protection either.
For online games, using an account tied to the download account will keep people from using piracy that way, but look at all the people who downloaded Warcraft3 and then never played online.
Long and short, there has to be a margin built into this business model that's tolerant of a certain level of underground distribution. If the system is not tolerant of this, and tries to depend on legislation, litigation, or user controls to keep users from distributing copies then it won't work.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Anyone care to cut and paste the text for a brother?
Most of the games at that site are lame, old, or lame and old.
The idea is not new - EB had a service that you could rent a computer game, and it would download and install to your system - allowing you to play the game for the specific period of time, then if you actually went out and bought it - the saved games and everything would transport right over. The service tanked (as far as I know, EB doesn't have a link to it anymore), don't know why... Hopefully, this one does better, and has a better selection of games.
We Canadians are geniuses...? jsp=/jsp/home .jsp&lang=en
http://www.gamesmania.com/display.do
No idea how this Gamesmania service is doing, but this is actually the second such service our major telco (yes, Bell Canada) has tried to launch. The first one, Software Lane, was about a year in the planning, but never even went fully live. That was back in about 1999 to my recollection.
Yahoo has a service very similar to this it's called Games on Demand. The difference is that you only get 10 games per month.
Though because it's an advanced feature, they don't publicize it. I have to google for these games myself. They even code-named them "ROMZ" so that newbie users don't stumble on them by accident and cause a support nightmare.
Ñ'
Exactly what about this idea make you feel it is "5 years too early"? You think it's really cool, so why can't/shouldn't its time be now?
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
I don't think its too soon for games on demand.. Look at all the people who play on sites like pop-cap games, yahoo games and msn zone. There are many games that are available on demand, and as thus are played on demand.
I think the factor that will truly bring this idea success will be when you don't have to download to play the game. You visit the URL, and the game plays... Maybe that would require the game to install on demand... or maybe it already exists with languages like java and flash, where all you need to download are some datafiles (And a small amount of game code).
An online browser-based Starcraft RPG? Only at
In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
They have the games on demand service. There are many other semi-repackaged versions of this. Generally older games. But good for the non-hardcore gamer, I think. I'm playing Age of Wonders which I never got to play, with The Outforce. They've got some Star Trek games, too. For me, it is worth the money, because I almost never buy software. Especially after the MOO3 disaster, I don't think I'll buy again for a very long time.
... as long as the ISP doesn't start capping you. My current isp decided to change the terms of service for its subscribers so anything more then 5GB is an extra fee. Since it is run by the ISP, hopefully they'll take that in to consideration if the idea takes off.
IF the GSP model is something that will happen - it will be interesting to see if this becomes a good marketing model.
If this proves to be good youll see things like "command and Conquer generals: EXCLUSIVELY at Verizon Internet Services"
or something like that...
but its a good idea. I mean imagine if all your opponents are on the same core ISP - the ping time average for all users would be around the same (ideally).
anyway - what if you take the SBC/Yahoo model further.
You will get ISPs and Gaming/Content companies who team up to provide you with specific exclusive offerings. A more specialized ASP - from an entertainment perspective.
Might make a small local pop-colo model viable - if you know that your local game colo is going to have close good lines for you, you would be inclined to use them.
lots of avenues to think about on these lines.
It makes a quasi disk device (X: Y:) that has the game. But it is more like NFS with caching. They push the first 100mb or so (variable per game, just to get the core/intro material in there) into your local cache (hard drive). Then, as you call for more information from the game (more missions, scenerios, etc), they are streamed over the network to your local disk cache device. Pretty slick, actually.
It works pretty well, but I have noticed a few problems. There were some things that were delivered as they are downloaded on some games, when they shouldn't be (primarily, movies). Age of Wonders gives me a lot of hard drive chatter on the main screen of the game. Looks like data was placed sub-optimally and it has to seek to hell and back to read something over and over and over and over (basic animations, perhaps). Bad programming or layout.
From a service standpoing, I'm happy with it. Their back-end enging is EXEtender, which you'll see some other game-on-demand services use as well with some of the same game titles (usually from Infogrames). For them, it has got to be a nice way to squeeze more profits out of dead titles.
This kind of arrangement is a real win for the smaller game developer. It gives them a chance to distribute their game to a wide audience, with little or no up front publishing costs, beyond the basic PR and marketing.
:^P
Think of it as like the web for games. Before the web, the basic modes of mass publishing were huge and daunting. Want to write up a description of how you mod'ed a computer case, and reach a world wide audence in a pre-web world? Forget it. Now days, just get Cowboy Neal to post a link on Slashdot and you've got more attention than you had bargained for
And it scales well too. Try in a conventional game retail world to suddenly increase supply by a few 100k copies overnight. Now try it in an online world - where your only real problems are bandwidth and server load.
I was able to attend an informal presentation of Steam by one of the Valve guys (I can't remember his name), and it didn't look like there would be anything but Windows support for this sort of thing. Granted, the idea is pretty solid, if you're in to the idea of not actually owning a physical cd with your software on it, but with no support for Mac or Linux, I'm having a hard time getting jazzed about this idea, either in supporting it as a game developer, or as a gamer. Is this just me, or does anyone else feel this way?
'Phone-jacking: Give someone a ring, they'll have to answer to find out who it is!' - Threni
... Like me.
Wouldn't this plan allow me to sign-up, download all the games available for $10 and then quit. I could then play those games for a few months without paying monthly. Then, later if they had more games I could sign up and repeat. If I can work it that way, this company will not get the recurring cash flow they expected.
On the other hand it is still a win. A bunch of games that otherwise were getting dusty in the bargain bin or bit bucket get another go round because they are available easily and cheap. $10 for all the games I could download in a month: Sounds GREAT!
This space for rent
Seems to me this is a fancy version of the SegaChannel! Am I right, or am I right? :-)
Huxley
Interesting games indeed.
"Caution: Exent Technologies Ltd asserts that this content is safe"
exent.. exent.. where have I seen that name...
Yahoo! Online Games Contain Spyware, the story on Civ3 downloadable from yahoo.
So they just moved to another platform, right?
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
Heck, this is offtopic as it comes, but I just recently threw away my VOODOO card box. I still have the card :) Sucker cost 250 bucks when it first came out. OUCH! But boy did it make GLQuake a work of art. I bet you old cards like that will be come like old baseball cards down the road. Well probably not. =p
this reminds me of a prior attempt by the real networks to provide a game subscription service named RealOneArcade. i don't think the service became all that popular, though - unfortunately, it seems they didn't offer much aside from arcade and puzzle games, and there's only so much demand for those.
:)
but in general, the subscription model can be amazingly profitable. even if games-on-demand bring only a fraction of the incredible revenue from on-line games, it's still a lot of money. not to mention they do a good deed of breathing new life into old games.
My other car is a cons.
consoleclassix.com/ has a free service for NES games and a pay service ont he way for SNES games. Basically, they own cartrages of all of the roms they have availible to play, and limit how many people can play a game at once to how many carts. they actually own. Pretty spiffy and legal way to play some of the classics. :)
Suppose the ISP finds that there were 1,000 downloads of a particular title one month. How do they pay the software companies royalties? I mean, what if the user downloaded it, realized it was a mistake, then deleted it without ever playing the game. Does that count as a "sale?"
the offer from the German provider T-Online, where you get Splinter Cell for 4 days and 9.99 Euros.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
... or 15 years too late? When I was a young lad, we had a service from out cable company for downloading games. There was a little box that we had to plug into the side of our Intellivision game console, and for a small fee (something like $10-20/month, can't remember exactly) we had access to approx. 20-30 games. They usually changed the selection monthly, but the more popular games stayed for several months.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
It will survive forever, unless Nietche Says anything about it...
Bye!
Have an ISP (cable/DSL) that has gaming servers at the ISP, available to ISP customers only. Charge the customers a little more per month(or make it a seperate fee) to access said servers(tribes, cstrike, whatever) where you would get low pings, playing against other players with low pings. Have a good map rotation, friendly(but fair) admins, and a message board, with local mirrors to download cstrike updates, etc.
Wonder if people would pay for that. The only thing it depends on is a lot of subscribers who want to play the same games.
It's looking like I'm going to be on house arrest for a few months, and I've been trying to find low-cost ways to entertain myself for long periods of that time. This looks like the solution for me!
The canadian telephone company, Bell Canada, has been offering games-on-demand for some time now. The service is very inexpensive, and there are 100+ games to choose from. The download speeds are exceptionally fast. What's interesting is that they apply all the latest patches to the games already, and they even test extensively for operating system compatibility. How cool is that? Makes you wonder what those US telcos have done for us lately...
The service is available at gamesmania.com
I was in on an early marketing thing for one of these in I don't know, 1999?
I use the Yahoo Games on Demand service, and honestly, I'm thrilled with it. They have several different payment options, up to $15/month for 10 games. Some games you can only rent for 3 days and that costs $5. Usually the newer stuff.
The selection is pretty good, again, mostly older stuff like Civ III and railroad tycoon, but also some really interesting games like Legion and Tropico. I'd prolly say I buy about 4 computer games a year, spending about $200...probably more. For me, $15/month is a bargain and I get to try many more games.
The technology isn't quite 100%, but it's good enough and getting better. I think everyone should try it out, especially considering you can get started for $5.
Does any one remember the Sega Channel? Basically, your sega genesis was hooked up to the cable and you downloaded games and played them that way. I (Being a nintendo zealot) only played when I went to friends' houses, but I was really cool not having to go to Blockbuster to get a game.
I wonder what ever happened to that.....
What, me Tweet?
I would suspect that you won't be able to play the latest and greatest from this service, perhaps again the 'occasional gamer' market.
I suppose that wouldn't change a great deal for me, since I refuse to give over $45 for a game, I end up waiting a month or two anyhow.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Hmm, i really don't like that idea. It sounds like it'd make the game hard or even impossible to mod, and for some games the mods are quite fun and even important...
This service seems to be doing very well in Canada, the service is, I believe $15 per month (not per game)and you can download 1 or all games. And the list of games is impressive since the games are not all 5+ year old titles ( Civilization III, Star Trek Armada II). Check it out at http:\\www.gamesmania.com
I'd definatly pay for that!
britt@newmail.net
The Britt Wanabe
Having another distribution method available to consumers is always a good thing. This will give the hardcore gamers a chance to try a game out for a while and see if it's worth buying. Hopefully it'll also increase the popularity of the PC gaming market which may drive some prices down a bit. I don't see a downside to this as long as we still have a choice.
Cybercity, my ISP, had a GOD server ever since they started offering ADSL but It never really catched on (not enough advertisment proberly.. well, actually none)
The reason you see alot of older games is that publishers are hesitant to make games availiable in a G.O.D format at the same time they are released to retail stores. The reason being, G.O.D is perceived as a threat by retailers, and given that currently retailers are the biggest channel, publishers might prefer not to upset them. (this may or may not change in the future as broadband becomes more prevalent as a delivery channel).
As for piracy, the games on demand technology being used here is probably based on the exent system (http://www.exent.com). Application data in the exent system is encyrpted and compressed before being delivered to the consumer, a connection is maintained with the media delivery server at all times, without this connection you cannot start the application or decrypt its data. The user also never has the full application on their computer at any time, its streamed as its needed (they use application profiling to make sure you have downloaded the data you need ahead of when you need it). Its not unbreakable, nothing is, but publishers have signed off on it being secure enough for them to use.
G.O.D probably isn't ready for the market yet (or perhaps the market isn't ready for G.O.D), the technology works fine, but broadband just isnt in enough households for it to be a big market (You need more then just the "hardcore" gamers to use this to see any profit). There is also the reluctance of the publishers to release new titles to G.O.D at the same time as retail holding it back.
TELUS.net in Canada has been offering games that can be downloaded as a subscription service for over 6 months now.
You can find information at TELUS.net Games
Yittrix
Any made by Valve product that is "coming soon" should be viewed with a high degree of skepticism. I pre-ordered the "coming soon" TF2 addon pack for Half-Life that was supposed to arrive during the last week of November, 1998.
This is a very good idea. Games drop quickly in value after they are released.
However, when old games are distributed through stores they still have to be burnt on CDs, put into shiny boxes, shipped to stores and stored there.
This solution is a win-win. Gamers get access to more games cheaper, and developers get increased revenues.
Tor
I believe they call it usenet here
For 13$/month I surf the net.. why pay additional 10$ for just games?
don't get trolled!
love slashdot. populate it. use it. abuse it. hate it. kill it. miss it. stop following links, they only kill servers.
Many thousands of people use this model right now in a wide, free beta test of Counter-Strike on the Steam platform. It works nearly flawlessly over a high speed connection -- and why Steam hasn't been able to find distribution partners and implement a real subscription service is anyone's guess. I don't think the technology's 5 years too early -- the infrastructure and technical know how is present. Perhaps the difficulty lies in changing the current business model for game distribution overnight.
I'm surprised to see all the positive posts about this service. Where are the paranoiacs who are typically worried about everything moving to a subscription-based pay as you go model?
... except they never have anything in stock. At least this scheme wouldn't have that problem.
Casual gamers? They won't subscribe. They can download all the demos they can eat for free. Download all you want and then quit? It seems unlikely that anyone offering this service wouldn't add a big "catch" such as a download limit or a minimum term for membership.
"Hardcore" gamers? Why would they want to try this, when many of them digest a long game over a period of weeks?
Don't get me wrong, I belive in alternative forms of media distribution (lord praise shareware, freeware, locked downloadables, and even the standardized, small-sized PC game box!), but this strikes me as the answer to the question nobody asked.
Besides, are there really that many new PC games coming out these days? I've stopped subscribing to PC Gamer since their demo disc offerings shrunk from 10-15 games a month in the heyday, down to one or two now. Not to mention all the free demos available online.
Perhaps I'm just feeling burned by the terrifically lame Redoctane.com, a Netflix-like service that loans out video games
Simply put, this sort of thing is the future. Software licensing on a per-time basis is an extremely attractive business model. Furthermore, as much as I don't want to pay for a piece of software for as long as I'm using it, it will actually encourage quality software. This is simply because if your program sucks, people will stop paying for it. You won't be able to make much money by selling worthless software that looks pretty and well-advertised anymore.
-Amalcon
believe it or not, extras like mods, maps, and in game patches actually work.
Also, I would imagine they would need some current, A-list titles for this to really take off. However, it is probably beyond their means at this point: unless Valve is backing them. But what the heck has Valve done except sit on things? I remember lusting after Team Fortress 2 a few YEARS ago, and Half-Life 2 is a forgotten dream. IMO, Valve isnt even relavant anymore; they had their fifteen minutes. They could still prove me wrong, but I smell Daikatana written all over them.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
...Direct Connect is free.
I've actually started collecting original CD's for their nostalgia value. I'm currently trying to acquire all the original lucasarts games. I got Full Throttle in the original celluphane the other day and I'm working on getting day of the tentacle..which that code wheel thingy and all.
A friend of mine just got the OG duke3d with the mousepad..still wrapped in celluphane. Fun hobby I've picked up..should be interesting to see what else I can get.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Customers will feel intimidated by this if their ISP charges extra for big downloads. People already hate all the forms they have to fill out for taxes. If gaming on demand requires more than one form for billing, people will avoid it because it's too complicated. And how will it work for players under 18? If it works by some charge card system, how will their parents set limits? And how easy will it be for the kids, who usually know the technology better than the parents, to cheat those limits?
Canada had this type of service for a year now. check out Games Mania
To my knowledge, this is the first time an ISP offers this kind of service.
Well, for limited versions of "ISP", it's actually a pretty old idea. The Blue Sky Rangers' site notes PlayCable, a service for playing Intellivision games across your cable TV line.
Of course, no geek story about the PlayCable would be complete without noting the story of how the Intellivision's version of Bump 'n' Jump was developed.
I don't consider the cracking issuing to be of much importance. As it was pointed out before, this is aimed mostly at casual gamers and gaming history has shown that casual gamers don't spend their time getting a white pasty skin look at night while looking up cracks, warez, and pr0n.
www.gamesmania.com is doing something similar, but more like "renting" out games.
I don't know exactly how much of an offset can be reaped here, but I think one major efficiency of this distribution method is in the massive cost of packaging/distributing side of the gaming marketplace. I would not be a bit surprised to see a massive reduction in material and especially labor overhead when you consider the reduction in manufacturing and transportation, not to mention the massive effort required to maintain relationships with retailers and their markups. Keep in mind also that many games ar sold past their prime at about the $10 pricerange for years after their initial realease, and if it's still profitable at that point then it must be feasible. I think this is just the beginning of 21st-century software distribution, and if I were EB, for example, I'd be working overtime on my Internet strategy right about now.
* Please do not read my signature.
Just like the others, I want to have the software on a disk. With the way things are going with DRM and streaming software I really do not like this idea.
The main reason is that it gives the company more control over the software. At least when I own the physical disk, cd, dvd, etc, I know that I can keep using it as long as I like, have the security knowing that if something goes wrong I still can reinstall it, etc. Then there is with some exceptions (mmorpgs, virus protection, etc) the fact that they can't charge me anymore for the software that I paid.
With something like a streamed game for example, what would happen if the company goes out of business? I would probably not be able to use it again. The business could also put restrictions on the software, with the usual EULA that allows them to disable and even take away the software for what ever reason they feel like. I sure wouldn't like it if the game I legally bought this way was removed by company and just happens to occur when they start introducing new fees scheme.
I also wonder how much it will cost me to keep my software, it may cost $10 a month for a similar service but I would rather pay $50 and use a disk that they can't take away from me or charge me more for later. Besides, most of those listed are so so bargain bin titles that you can own them for $10 and less.
The only good thing I can see in this is that by having the game streamed it might reduce cheating.
They are letting you get bargin bin games, and with the exception of a few titles most of them have average or worse scores from reviewers.
I think they are using the add up stratagy, you have to keep paying to play the games and that adds up to about $120 a year. For that price you could just pick up about all of the games for around $10 and less. That would still be cheaper then paying $120 a year.
I can see this as nice service if you do want to play the games they offer and can finish a lot of them in a month.
Simular thru cable called the Sega Channel but it didnt last thru the test markting it would beam the roms to your genesis thru your Cable System. It didnt get past the Test Marketing stages thu. ALso one couldnt keep the games since it was a ROM.
upside: Access to trying more games (legitimately) without having to shell out $50.
downside: If this distribution platform became really popular, it could encourage game developers to create games that had a lot of short-term flash, but not a lot of long-term replayability. So we'd see even less of a focus on gameplay over graphics than has already been the case with PC games these days. It also could further reduce the creation demos for games, as it would be easy (and tempting) for game publishers to say, "There's no demo available, but you can try out our game for $5."
To my knowledge, this is the first time an ISP offers this kind of service
I'm sure people are holding back on their wisecracks concerning your knowledge.
To my knowledge...this is old news, and not that great.
For example: OnDemandGames.PlaySite.com" uses Stream Theory as the wizard behind their curtain. That's right, it's just a Citrix Terminal Server type of thing...
Imagine paying only $10 per month for games like Unreal Tournament. You'd have to ask: why not buy the GOTY edition at the local store and get better performance...for only 15 bucks??
For a long time, people just have not been willing to pay for stuff online. I mean, look at something like Fileshack. A long time ago fileshack was a little weakling but you could get files for free and fast. Well, such a service would have killed shacknews, so they launched Mercury. All the downloads you want, very fast, and tons of cool extras. A lot of people whined about paying for such a service, when you can still find the files if you look for free and sometimes just as fast. However, it seems to be catching on.
This company mentioned in the article is just going to have to keep customer service in mind. I think when a website moves from a free nature to a pay for perks, a lot of webmasters or teams don't understand what customer service is about. This is a really stupid and shameless plug, but fileshack mercury now allows you to do referals and if you refer someone, you get free service! I mean, how cool is that? This game company I hope will do something similar. Btw, if you want to sign up for fileshack, use this link. Really its quite nice and worth the few bucks, especially considering the Doom3 demo is lurking in the near future.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Microsoft's goal is to sell software as a service. We bash them when they try to do things like this. Why is this a good thing? (other than the fact that its cheap)
Sounds like sega channel i had in the mid 90s. plug a cartidge into your sega genisis, cartridge connected to the cable tv wire. select a game and it takes a minute to download it and then it starts.
-foxxz
I have, somewhere in a box, a flier from way
back in the Atari 2600 days for a service that
allowed you to download games for your Atari
2600 via telephone to a device you installed
in your cartridge slot. The games changed
monthly or so, and you could save (I believe)
two of them on the device at any time and play
them as long as you wanted to. Everything old
is new again...
I think that game subscription services for multiple games will be the wave of the future. Who wants to pay $12.95 a month each for 5 games that you either don't have time enough to play, or will get tired of?
What online games really compete against is cable television, so increasingly it will be priced like cable television. You'll get the "basic" games channel with a number of games for a flat fee each month, some people will want their premium "hbo" games channel for more sophisticated games, and some people will pay-per-play.
Skotos (www.skotos.net) is one online game company already moving in that direction. They have 6 games currently for a flat monthly fee, and say that they are adding more.
-- Herder of Cats
>To my knowledge, this is the first time an ISP >offers this kind of service.
then let me enlighten you, telia (a/the major telecom/ISP company in sweden) has had this kind of service atleast 2-3 years. They did thou run into trouble when the client machines became Win2K and WinXP since one needed to be administrator to take controll over thoose boxes. But im still sure that they are running the service (known as GOD, Games On Demand).
And I'll bet you that 15 to 30 years down the road, almost all material possessions - including most antiques, caviar, diamond, and SLI voodoo's - will become almost worthless thanks to nanotechnology being able to manipulate atoms like bits.
The only way to help preserve the value of a one-of-a-kind material object is to make sure that NO ONE EVER gets their hands on the master molecular scan backup(s) (and there WILL have to backups for insurance purposes). All it takes is one leak and the Mona Lisa can be perfectly copied by anyone who fancies a copy hanging on their wall (recycling the consituent molecules to be found in the garbage).
Objects made of rare earth elements like gold will still hold a higher BASE VALUE though, because Au is rare in comparison to more common matter like the carbon that makes up diamond.
So.... would you mind sharing your voodoo's molecular blueprint with me? :)
--
Power to the Peaceful
My ISP, Telia, have had this service for about three years, so I don't think the Dutchies are the first to come up with this idea :-)
Did anyone else have a pre-AOL Gameline Master Module modem and download games to their 2600 back in the day?
You might want to check out Yahoo Games as well, they do a games on demand service and have been for a while. Haven't checked so I'm not sure if they have more current games in the monthly service but I doubt it. However, they do offer a $4.95/3day trial of some newer games.
The Danish ISP Cybercity had a similar service called PlayingGod - www.playinggod.dk .. but it seems they've shut it down now. Then again it only worked on the Win9x series, when pretty every Windows user I knew was using Win 2000.
Unfortunately, Planet Internet is an awful ISP in every other respect. When I stopped using their services after three years of frustration with their unreliable SMTP, their lack of SPAM wave filtering, and having to put up with their customer service SPAM as well as a completely ignorant help desk service ("You have problems sending large e-mail? OK, let's run through your ISDN hardware configuration first."). They dropped their monthly fee, and then started luring customers with all kinds of add-on services, without improving the quality of the actual connection service. Then they started billing dial-up cost (pay per minute) instead of the telco with no opt-out regulation, so I could not separate Internet use between private and business anymore. And THEN I had just about had it, and switched to an ISP that simply runs a decent service, doesn't offer (too many) entertainment add-ons, and doesn't offer those written out in SPAM.
Interesting is, that this ISP simply *has to* offer these add-on services, as their fee is much too low, but also because they are the daughter company of telco KPN Telecom, and they (need to/ have been ordered to) generate interest in KPN's broadband services this way. You simply wouldn't download a 500MB game over a dial-up connection, so this is just another scheme to drive people's interest in purchasing broadband connections.
JeR
didn't sega already do this about a decade ago with the sega channel?
heh,i think that ideology is already in the works.kinda smacks of copyrighting.
Planet is Holland's most consumer unfriendly ISP. Over several years it has never been able to get the binary newsgroups working (many messages are missing) and as a matter of routine it denies to have received mail that it doesn't like - like complaints and cancellations.
It amazes me that they get a chance to promote themselves at Slashdot.
I remember from Chem that the carbon bonds in diamond are very very strong, and therefore it would take a nanotech device tremedous amounts of time and energy to forge those bonds one by one to make a fake diamond. diamonds are forever.
a lot of what drives people buying games, especially kids and even older gamers who are somewhere between casual and hardcore, is hearing about "the coolest new game" from their friends (like seeing gta3 on playstation 2, or splinter cell on xbox or pc, or whatever.) after a few cycles of hearing about a cool new game that is on store shelves but not being able to play because it isn't on the service yet, while still getting hit with a monthly fee, would piss me off enough to cancel. it would be like a netflix offering releases that have already been out for 6 months in the video store down the street and offering mostly b movies.
that said, if they could secure classic but oldish titles like half-life/counterstrike, the sims, and simcity, and other games that have mass appeal to casual gamers, it might be ok (but again it might not be worth it to the subscriber to get hit with a monthly fee when they can buy the one or two games they actually pay for $20 each.)
the problem is, i guess i don't see a large enough market segment that would be like SWEET YES I WANT THIS that the service would need to attain critical mass and be profitable.
my 2c
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
This service would be great if I didnt own 75% of the titles on the list already, Alot of those titles should already be in a gamers collection. I would use this service for obscure but interesting games i never bought, and new games. Both are unlikely to appear as obscure ones arent popular and new ones are far to expensive for them. I would prefer it if some developers released protected versions of their games at the same time as their store releases.
- Shrapnel
Article 1
Article 2
"Seven years and six months!" Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully.
"An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you'd asked MY advice, I'd have
said 'Leave off at seven' -- but it's too late now."
"I never ask advice about growing," Alice said indignantly.
"Too proud?" the other enquired.
Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. "I mean,"
she said, "that one can't help growing older."
"ONE can't, perhaps," said Humpty Dumpty; "but TWO can. With
proper assistance, you might have left off at seven."
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass"
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