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.

Comments

well

[toddhunter]

you can't blame them too much for trying something like this. Is there any chance we will be seeing more of it? Nah I think not.
Game developers want you to play their demos, so pulling something like this, which can only limit the number of people playing it, is sure to fail.
It's the old rule of the internet, anything you can buy somewhere, you can get free somewhere else. It won't be long before a gaming site that apposes this stuff becomes popular and so the cycle will continue

Re:well

[Soul-Burn666]

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.

Re:well

[Soul-Burn666]

The idea is they will all use the SAME network.

Meaning, DownloadSite and OtherDownloadSite could use the same .torrent... that is what would be best for everyone. Have different trackers means smaller user base meaning less efficiency.

Re:How does Gamespy live on?

[Soul-Burn666]

Gamespy really is a pain in the ass.

The best game-browser I know, by far, is The All-Seeing Eye.

It works fast, simple, the program doesn't lock-up when performing a search, useful filters, auto-updates.....

And that's only in the FREE version of the program. The registered version adds some more features.

This is one piece of software I can really say is good.