Game Distributed Online Forgoes Publishers
KrackHouse writes "A group of developers from Black & White got together and used their bonuses to fund a project called Live For Speed. This online racing simulator uses the Internet as its distribution channel exclusively. No retail stores carry LFS and you need to use PayPal or a credit card to buy it.vIf this is successful will game publishers go the way of the RIAA and face irrelevance? LFS is much less expensive than a typical boxed title and if it ends up becoming a profitable venture more devs will surely jump on the solo bandwagon." It'll be a long time until this sort of thing becomes more common, and there's still a lot of consumer reassurance that comes from buying something in a box and having the disc laying around. It's a nice case study for what will inevitably become the way things are done, though.
All the comments about open-source, business models, etc, and no reviews? I downloaded the final beta bit ago- it is a very good racing game. You race street type sports cars, they handle very realistically, the online racing is quite good, the cars are customizable, there is a strong online community, and the whole game can be modded rather easily. If you like sports cars, this gives you a very good approximation of actually racing street-legal real cars. http://lfs.racesimcentral.com/ is the URL