Slashdot Mirror
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."
Speak for yourself. I live in a rural area, the best I can get is 84kbps over an 802.11b connection from some small ISP 30 miles away. I'm sure there's plenty of other people here in the US in the same boat as I am, living in a rural area without access to broadband.
Online distribution is fine, just make sure that the product is still available on regular media that I can order online, or pick up at the store.
And before anyone suggests moving, living in a small valley just a few miles North of Yellowstone far outweighs not having large bandwidth available.
Now, Valve is the pioneer with Steam, and while there are some great parts about it...unfortunately the downsides outweigh them significantly.
Downsides
Unreliable - I'm sure many here remember the first day woes of Steam as fans the world over all tried to access Steam for the first time only to be out of luck as it was down. This would have been fine, since there is a great single-player game in HL2....except for the fact that you need to connect to Steam initially to gain access to that.
No Hard Copy - While its great to be able to download the game whenever you want, this is a huge problem for people who like to sell their games when they move on to the next one. You can't sell your license to the download.
Lockin - This is my biggest gripe with them. Valve has proven time and time again to be a greedy company. Why should I trust them with this system, especially when they have a lot of my personal details? Additionally, this system lets them begin the process of charging for every single thing they can. For example, you now need to pay for the full versions of DoD and NS. That would not have happened without Steam. In the future, I'm sure all the good mods will be sold through Steam, thus taking what was once done out of love by fans and given out for free to enhance value of the game (and drive core game sales!) and turning it into yet another money making tool rather than the 'added bonus' it used to be considered by the community. And if you think charging for mods is bad, wait until you head down the EA path and start adding additional weapons that are useable in the core game but only if you bought the expansion. Can you say "pay-to-upgrade weapons in FPS"? Yeah, not fun.
All in all, digital distribution online is the way of the future. I just don't trust a company like Valve to handle it.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Where's a mod point when you need it?
Most of the {closed-source} software in use in the world is pirated. The big corporations know this and turn a blind eye to it; because they know that it's effectively free advertising, and free training, for their products. If Caz sees Shaz's pirate copy of Word, there's a chance -- a slim one, but a chance nonetheless -- that she might buy herself a copy; there's even a chance that Shaz might win the lottery or something, have an attack of conscience and decide to pay for all her software. Daz, meanwhile, downloads a shareware graphics editing program that the author has crippled. It will only cost him £50 if he wants to buy the full version, rather than £500 for Adobe Photoshop; so that's a £450 saving. Twenty-eight days later, of course, the program disables saving -- and rather than pay for the full version, he simply gets a pirate copy of Adobe Photoshop. Now, in Daz's mind, he has saved £500!
By swallowing piracy, the big players are reinforcing their monopolies; smaller companies might be more than able to compete with full-priced software, but not when what is rightly or wrongly touted as "THE industry standard" comes effectively for free, so they go out of business. I'm sure if I was feeling in a more RMS-ish mood I'd say it serves them right for selling closed-source software; but I also think it's wrong to shoot someone in the back. Really, if they're going to be defeated in the marketplace, then at least they deserve the honour of being defeated in a free and fair marketplace. At the moment, the market for software is neither.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!