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.

Comments

Tolerance For Piracy

[Bonker]

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.