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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.
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.
^_^