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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!
"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.
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.
I think this is why it would be great for occasional gamers, or someone that would like a "try-before-you-buy" type situtaion. Pay for a month and try a bunch of games and then if you are going to play a game over and over then drop your subscritpion and buy it.
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.
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
I'm guessing it's a loss-leader to make broadband more attractive.
My attempt to read their site only got as far as "Om deze site optimaal te bekijken is versie 5 van de Macromedia Flash plugin benodigd. U kunt deze installeren door hier te klikken.", though. Hopefully "U kunt" means something different in Dutch, but I'm not taking any chances and won't be klikkening hier.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
From comments of beta testers, it sounds like the games maintain a connection to the ISP offering the service. This is probably an encrypted stream of keep-alive responses. They games probably also distributed to the user in an encrypted install package.
The problem here is that at some point, the decryption information is in the hands of the user, even if he doesn't know it. All it takes is one guy to do adqueate packet sniffing or memory reading (ala ShowEQ) to intercept the key and then build an app that acts as a licensing server.
If you look at any of the high-end grphical apps (3dsmax, for example), this is the way they enfoce their licenses... with a manditory server connection. One of the 'cracks' for 3dsmax is an app that installs as a windows service and intercepts the app's request for authorization. It masquerades itself as the authorization server and tells 3dsmax to run. The crack comes as a windows installer, easy for a novice to install and run. (I've heard of more than one novice user opening themselves up to BO or other trojans in this manner.)
3dsmax is a fairly esoteric modelling application with a relatively small possible user-base, including those who are running illigitimate copies.
Games such as those listed in the artcle would be in *much* higher demand than a modelling application and subject to significantly more attention from crackers and warez distributors.
As complex as it is, I think this is a situation of 'infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards'. Sooner or later, probably sooner, someone's going to crack this. Unless the system is tolerant to having that take place, it won't survive.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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.
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.
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."
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? :)
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Power to the Peaceful