Atari, ToEE, And P2P Distribution For Games?

Txiasaeia writes "In a very strange turn of events, it seems as if Kazaa (and only the 'official' Kazaa, not any of its non-spyware derivatives) is offering a copy of Atari's new PC RPG, Temple of Elemental Evil for download. What makes this particular case unusual is the fact that, once you download the 6-hour time-limited 'demo', you can unlock the full game for $49.95. While Steam has been doing this with Counterstrike, Kazaa is footing the bill for the bandwidth for ToEE, which makes it one of the first times that a major game publishing house has embraced a P2P client as part of its official distribution network. Is this latest move by Atari an attempt to garner media attention (especially with the RIAA and Kazaa in the news), or are they seriously embracing P2P as a legitimate source for game distribution?"

Comments

The torrent

[Apreche]

The bit torrent is 10,000 times better for this sort of thing. Nobody who knows better will go download the spyware laden official kazaa just to get this demo. But just about anybody will get the torrent if they don't already have it. And the torrent works better for this sort of thing, since it is a one time extreme popularity explosion.

Re:How is it locked?

[Snowspinner]

The original shareware Quake 1 CDs had the full version of Quake, the full versions of Doom, Doom 2, and both of the id-made wads of Doom 2, and I think it had all the Wolf 3D stuff as well. You were supposed to buy access codes from id via the phone to unlock any of this.

Needless to say, the effect was to make easy-to-pirate versions of their entire back catalogue - instead of downloading the whole program and disc images and the like, you had to download a much smaller cracking program. =)