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

Good for occasional gamer

[FortKnox]

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.

Re:Good for occasional gamer

[Erasmus Darwin]

"But for the hardcore gamer, I think they'd prefer to have the game in hand."

This service would allow them to best decide which games they actually want to have in hand.

Translation

[koh]

"Since P2P consumes our bandwidth anyway, we may as well provide the games ourselves and make a buck in the process".

Smart move though.

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.

Re:Tolerance For Piracy

[Bonker]

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.

Old news...

[levik]

My ISP has been offering this with all the old consoles for a few years now. And I don't even have to pay anything extra - it's included in the monthly fee I pay.

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.

Yahoo!

[AtariDatacenter]

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.

Re:Not worth the money

[Blaine Hilton]

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.

Re:Yahoo! - How it works.

[AtariDatacenter]

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.

Not only that, some people like to have the origin

[Rooked_One]

Some like to have the original "collectors edition" - if you will - CD case, box, and possibly tin in their possesion. I know I still have my CD case of Quake from the day it came out, as I'm sure many other /.'ers do also. Or what about quake3 or any game that revolutionized gaming and made for lots of mods. I mean look at Half Life. IT CAME FROM QUAKE!!! Please don't say it came from quake2, I don't want to argue semantics with people who just don't know.

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

GamesMania - A Bell Canada Service

[matthewcraig]

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