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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.
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.
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.
As FortKnox said, Its monthly. Also, as a Steam beta tester I can tell you there are plenty of drawbacks. If their servers are down or for whatever reason decied you shouldnt be able to play, You loose the game. If you're on dialup, You cant play either. If your connection dies, no game. You see what I'm getting at -- its not all fun and games..erm..atleast not all fun..
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
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
It's a ISP in the Netherlands, SO its in Dutch ;)
I cannot find any tetris... :-/
Ok here's the list cut'n'plastard just for you.
Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare
Anachronox
Commandos 2: Men of Courage
Conflict Zone
Deus Ex: The Conspiracy
Driver
Gangsters 2: Vendetta
Hitman: Codename 47
IL 2 Sturmovik
Monopoly II
Outcast
Project IGI
Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear
Silent Hunter II
Supreme Snowboarding
Thief II: The Metal Age
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon
Tomb Raider: Chronicles
V-Rally 2 Expert Edition
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
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
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.
www.gamesmania.com is doing something similar, but more like "renting" out games.
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 :-)
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.
didn't sega already do this about a decade ago with the sega channel?