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."
It's better now than when Steam initally launched (IMHO) but it is still really lacking.
After reinstalling Windows recently to start things fresh I put all the games I play back on, disk by disk while I browsed the web. That is, all but one game, Day of Defeat: Source. I forgot to back it up and dread having to go through all the bullshit Valve is going to make me go through to get it back.
Honestly, if I had a disk I would probably be playing it again.
I actually had Steam before HL2 when they bundled it with the new Counter-Strike release (7.0 or something like that... My brother is the one who actually plays it.) I was able to preload HL2 onto my comp. When it came time to buy, I only had to tap in a credit card number to make it work. I heard bitching all around from others about the painful Steam experience associated with HL2, but for me it was actually quite pleasant.
I also find it cool how they are serving up mini-content such as a free HL2 side scroller prior to the actual game and the free bonus level "Lost Coast." Plus, all those little apps hide under one button instead of further cluttering up my desktop and start menu.
My brother also recently bought another game using some service known as direct2drive which also lets you download the game directly. I don't actually know how that went, but it seemed easy. He's not that computer savy but still had it working the same night.
IMHO, these services get an A+ from me. I look forward to more distrobution models such as Steam (The one consequence I can see is having a million downloaders clogging up your machine.)
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
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.
That's actually one big reason why game companies LIKE download-distribution methods like Steam. There was an earlier Slashdot article where publishers frustrated by second-hand game sales.
Now, Valve COULD implement a method where you could sell your license to download. They would just take in a percentage of your sale. However, they may lose out on potential revenue. Would they have made more money forcing the other person to buy a new copy? Maybe not, if the other person will ONLY buy the game if it's signficantly cheaper than retail. My guess is that companies won't want to take the risk, so we'll never see something like this in place. (Boo!)
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.
There ARE benefits to the lock-in system. Remember, physical media isn't foolproof. If you accidentally break or lose your media, and no longer have a receipt (or its long after the return period), then you're out of luck. But distribution systems have the possibility to remember your purchase forever (or as long as they last). The Xbox Live Arcade system is one good example. Your game downloads are tied to your account. Heck, you can even play it on your friends' 360. When you log out, though, it'll revert back to the trial version (which is very much a "viral" marketing move). I think that's pretty neat and a nice added feature, despite not owning actual physical media.
But I do understand a lot of the lock-in disadvantages, as you describe. Especially if the company goes down under or decides not to support their download scheme anymore. You can say MMOs have much the same problem. I'm sure there were a lot of unhappy Asheron's Call 2 players, when that game went south. *poof*
-- jchenx
Except at my house, where my internet provider rate limits both BitTorrent traffic and cumulative traffic. BitTorrent is rate-limited network-wide, and total traffic is limited on a per-port basis, where they start dropping 1/x packets, where x is approaching 1 until they stick you where they want you.
This sucks, as my wife plays WoW, and everytime they release an update, she has to either wait for the in-game bit-torrent-esque thing to download it at literally 3KB/sec, or go wait in line at file planet for 3 hours. And even then, when she downloads a big patch, it kicks everything else offline - AIM for instance, because of the way it's ratelimited, AIM packets are more likely to be left behind and never re-requested.
And even with all that, they're trying to push the whole "One port, One computer" thing, so that they can charge me $40/month for every device in the house, including my laptop, my work laptop, my media center, and my tivo. Fuck them.
Ugh. I hate my network provider. Anyway, sometimes the distribution model sucks.
~Will
sig?
He probably lives in the USA, where so-called "free market capitalism" has had the glorious success of causing high-speed internet access in many places to be controlled by a single local monopoly.
Funny how socialist Europe and Korea do so much better at providing a competetive communications marketplace where a variety of companies compete on quality, price, and service, while the supposed capital of the world economy languishes in the 1990s.
Lineage 1, you might recall, was a subscription-only product. In the days of yore it was a pain to download the gig-sized package and then patch with goodness knows how many extra files (Episodes 1-n); with your account you could opt to have a CD sent to you for free. Ebay always had a run of these CDs when a new episode came out, because you could get the content online with the autopatch, and sell off the CD cheap to some unsuspecting person who was interested.
Lineage 1 came out in 1998; digital delivery is by no means new!
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
Free software is abolutely not competitive in the games market. There are only a handful of opensource games and many are just blatant ripoffs of commercial games. They usually have development times that approach years while the actual output is well below a commercial game in quality. Sometimes the core gameplay gets tweaked enough over the years that it plays as well as the commercial counterparts but the interface and graphics are still horrible. Many genres are lacking from the opensource lineup, while you'll see many games with only multiplayer or randomly generated content you'll rarely see one that has a defined set of levels you play through and get an ending afterwards.
A cracker group can make hundreds of games playable per year. With opensource software they might get one game done after two to three years and it won't measure up to anything available commercially.
Never mind that cracking requires a different skillset than software programming.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.