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."
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.
"...and the irritation at this was nothing compared to the real bombshell."
Which was?!? Leave it to Slashdot to end the summary with a cliffhanger like that. I guess I'll have to wait for the dupe to find out what happens next...
I would think that it's tough for pirates to download games... I can't imagine you'd be able to get much bandwidth out there on the high seas.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I would think that it's tough for pirates to download games... I can't imagine you'd be able to get much bandwidth out there on the high seas.
Not when ye have a Galleon loaded with 20 cannon, 100 vicious men, and a cargo hold filled to the brim with ye backup tapes traveling at 5 knots due to a ragin carribean storm!
Yar! Thar be ye bandwidth!
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The gluttony implied by complaints of having to wait "four fucking hours" for a video game should make you ashamed. Some people don't have medical care / food / a place to live, and another segment of the population can't wait four hours for a video game. If you happen to be an American, thanks. You've made me ashamed to be an American.
If you accidentally cut off your foot with an axe, don't cry about it and rush to the hospital, you selfish glutton. Some people don't have legs!
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.
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!
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.