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Game Sites Rebel Over Exclusive Demos
Thanks to Shacknews for their open letter regarding Activision's Call Of Duty demo for PC, which will apparently be initially exclusive (with some file-based protection?) to GameSpy's FilePlanet subscribers. The letter announces that "...the following websites will not be carrying the Call of Duty playable demo, even after its exclusivity is over", and includes notable signatories such as Blue's News and Shacknews themselves. The appeal continues: "The above-listed websites hope to show Activision that the enthusiast industry is strongly opposed to the idea of exclusive demo releases. Feedback from our users shows that gamers hate to be forced through a single point of congestion if they want a demo right away... Deals like this hurt the industry much more than they could possibly enhance a single relationship." Update: 08/29 06:25 GMT by S : Activision have bowed to pressure, and will make the demo available everywhere, non-exclusively, from Friday night.
ANY P2P service would be good for releasing demos on. Fileplanet is a HEINOUS site. I hate having to go there for ANYTHING unless I have too.
Releasing your demo exclusively through them is idiocy. I mean speak up if you do, but I don't know ANYONE who has anything but bad things to say about Fileplanet. (I also don't know anyone who is a member either.)
It seems to have slackened off a bit these days, but in the past it was looking like Fileplanet were taking over EVERY download on the net. It seemed no matter what I wanted, ultimately, it all lead to their damn site.
Hahahaha... oh the joys of fileplanet. Like taking 5 tries to get a live download link in Opera... Or taking 3 tries to successfully download a (600mb) file... Only to find out that the .zip is corrupt.
*grumbles under breath*
One wonders ... how does gamespy continue to land these "exclusive" deals with these publishers?
Crappy servers, crappy players, and even worse, the games are HARD CODED to need gamespy, like Neverwinter Nights.
It's unfair, I couldn't boycott them if I wanted to, it seems like every PC game come with a "GAMESPY ENHANCED" sticker on it, meaning some in-game browser that doesn't work in multiplayer, and a game that won't work in single player AT ALL unless it can talk to a gamespy server. What a way to waste 60 bucks. WEAK.
Let us run our own servers, and keep your "value added" services to yourselves, we can do it better by ourselves anyway. All I want to do is be able to buy a game and play it online, why is that so hard? Wtf, Quakeworld did this crap better in the 90's better than any game does it TODAY.
Fileplanet used to be a quite stable site with rather minor waits. At some time, it became very popular that the huge bandwidth they had became saturated. Downloading was very slow, people had to wait in long lines to get a mediocre service. So what did Fileplanet do? Use this slowness for their own good and started offering "premium services" in order to d/l fast. At that time, it was already very easy to find sources for many files on other, much faster sites.
Bittorrent was written specifically for these kinds of sites. Sites with high-bandwidth, but with very large amounts of users, seeking specific, new files. If FP had used BitTorrent, they would have cut down the bandwidth needs by a huge factor. Therefore, might not even have to use these "premium" services to survive, and making downloads much faster.
I don't remember which download site it was, but there's one site that has 2 methods of recieving a file. Direct download, or using their own P2P system. These kinds of P2P programs aren't needed anymore since BT makes life much easier.
If all download sites would use BT for the latest, most popular, most bandwidth hogging files, everyone will be pleased. The users because they don't have to wait, and now downloading in very fast speeds. The sites because their bandwidth is offloaded to the net.
Moreover, older files will be downloaded in traditional ways. That isn't a problem becuase they don't saturate the bandwidth too much.
The only current problem with BT (I think) is that you can't have multiple trackers.... And a single tracker may crash because of the load.
If it was possible to have multiple trackers, one on each d/l site, all serving the same file, then downloading these files would be much easier.
^_^
IIRC, the first Unreal Tournament demo was released exclusively for 3DFX. At least there were several server where you could download the file, and it was possible to run it in software rendering mode, so you could play it without a Voodoo card.
Of course it made sense, since it was released for debugging purposes: narrowing down the hardware makes it much easier. I think Q3 had a similar pre-demo-debugging release.
Creating such a restriction for marketing purposes is not smart, IMHO. After all, you want to spread the demo. Everyone should play it. And everyone should like it (and buy the full game). A gamer that doesn't have the demo - because FilePlanet screws up or he doesn't like it or he doesn't want to wait - is one less potential buyer of the final product...
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
"If FP had used BitTorrent, they would have cut down the bandwidth needs by a huge factor."
Bittorent did not exist when they introduced this service. In fact, the premium service was more a response to the increase in bandwidth fees and decrease in ad revenue as the dot crash happened in 2000-2001.
You make a very good case for them doing it now, but the fact that the software didn't exist a few years ago seems to not be a factor in your post even though it's a very important fact.
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