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Downloading Games Not Just For Pirates
1up is running a piece entitled Digital Delivery, which looks at alternate distribution models for new titles in the here-and-now of fast download speeds. They cover outfits like Steam and GameTap, in addition to the ever popular Xbox Live. From the article: "Steam's birth came with some controversy, though. It was only in late 2004 that this happened, but if you missed it, a brief explanation might be in order. When Valve decided to embrace digital distribution, they didn't do it in half measures. The retail version of the game that shipped to stores was more like a formality to appease Vivendi Universal Games, Valve's megalithic publisher: for $50, gamers got a box containing five discs inside a sleeve. If players wanted a manual, they had to refer to the PDF version on the disc, and the irritation at this was nothing compared to the real bombshell."
Guild Wars optionally distributes its client over the web and on BT. When you launch the client you can enter a prepackaged product key or click a button to purchase one in a web browser. This is a great solution for all parties! Players don't have to repurchase the game due to broken media, and Anet prevents abuse since "pirated" copies cannot be played without a purchased serial. It's still recommended, however, to download the client from a trusted source.
That's because as is typical of /., the article summary is cut and paste directly from the article itself. The paragraph in question occurs on page 3 of the article if you want to skip ahead to it.
for great justice, this sig has been moved
The article claims that Wolfenstein 3-D was completely free with a donation requested if you liked the game. This fits well for the thought flow of their article, but is entirely untrue. Wolfenstein 3-D had only the first episode available for free, with a registration fee required before Apogee (id's publisher at the time) would send you the rest of the game in the mail. This is the model that their earlier Commander Keen games had used as well. It did not rely wholly on the selfless donations of patrons - the payees received something for their money; the other 2/3s of the game! In my opinion the success of Apogee and id had far less to do with community spirit and donations than it did with game addictions and allowance money - but of course, that wouldn't be as warm-and-fuzzy of a tidbit for a "downloaders are historically good people" article without this "slight" misstatement of facts.
It was an interesting article, but I was surprised to see they named Strategy First (http://www.strategyfirst.com/), a company I helped found, as being Russian. Strategy First started in Montreal and still has its head office there. Although we have a reputation in Canada as being more socialistic than the States, we're definitely not part of Russia.