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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.
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.
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