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Amazon Rolls Out Release-Day Game Delivery
1Up reports that Amazon has launched a new service for getting certain games into the hands of customers on release day, rather than simply shipping the games on release day. According to the press release, the service will be free for Amazon Prime customers, and available to everyone else for a $5.98 charge on upcoming titles Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Fable 2 and Gears of War 2. They tested the program recently with the release of Soul Calibur IV.
This is also a tad old. Unless Amazon can get me Tiger Woods in the next nine hours, they're going to miss the release date.
On the other hand, who really MUST have a game on release day? Get a life, really.
Steam ? A SOLUTION ?
I get much better service from BitTorrent.com. So long as that is true, the game industry has failed.
So you drank the cool-aid, eh ?
Yes, my solution is "free". But that is not my point. I'm happy to pay for games I play -- in fact, I do. I have not touched Half Life 2 with a ten foot pole, however. I'm sure it's a nice game, but no, I will not bend over and get steamed for it.
"Steam lets you buy a game from anyhwere, anytime"
Reasonably true. Anywhere with an Internet connection, anyway.
"Purchases are instant."
Reasonably true. Once I download it using their extremely crappy download system. More on that in a second.
"Games are installed automatically just by downloading."
Yupp. Not a hard thing to do either. Steam does more, though.
"Steam lets you play your games on any computer at any time."
Bullshit. Big whonking bullshit. Steam lets you play your games on any computer at any time -- IF you have an internet connection active at the moment or "logged in" and selected that you will want to play "offline" in a bit. On single player games. SINGLE PLAYER GAMES. Not online games.
I'm not prepared to "log on" just to play a single player game -- or indeed the single player campaign, for various reasons -- the chief one amongst which is that I am not connected to the net everywhere I go, and I see no reason WHATSOEVER to let Valve know when I consume my gaming fix. They have no reason to know.
Furthermore, if your account gets suspended for any reason /IN ANY GAME/, all the games you bought and paid for stop working. Fuck that. Seriously, fuck it. Even /IF/ you could assume that Valve does not make mistakes and that all bans and suspensions are just (and no, you can't assume that -- they're not gods, and they certainly don't care enough to make sure that every ban is reasonable), even then there is absolutely no reason to disable access to any single player game you legally bought. No way am I gonna sign up for something where you "buy" games, but not really -- your "bought" games can be revoked at any time for any reason, and you have no recourse. Fuck it, fuck them, and fuck people like them.
"Steam is usually cheaper than buying in a store."
Usually ? It damn well better be cheaper every time. The costs are a lot lower -- no manual printed, no DVD pressed, no box made, no shipping costs paid, no retail markup from going through that sales chain.
"Steam keeps your games up-to-date automatically."
Big whoop. This is not hard to do even without the "Steam" framework. And maybe, just maybe, I don't WANT to have the latest version, all the time. Not all updates are good updates. Some change gameplay to something you do not like at all, some introduce bugs that affect you adversely, etc.
I very much like the control offered by being able to select whether or not I want to update a game.
You agree it's not perfect. Great. So do I. You give away control over some things. Yepp. Well, all things, really. Without recourse. No way in hell am I gonna buy into that.
Now let's see why I don't like Steam.
a.) Technical incompetence. I have not kept up to date with their system, since I quite honestly could care less after the burns they already delivered -- but if your platform cannot handle proxy servers, or indeed offer proxy servers, your platform sucks. If I organize a lan party for 2000 people, I would really want to offer a proxy for game updates and game data. Encrypted, sure, but proxied. I don't want 2000 people downloading the 200mb update for game X that just got released a day before the party starts through one measly 10mbit/s connection (or even 50mbit/s). I want them to hit the local proxy servers for that data.
(I also don't want them to fucking PRE-load something that is not released yet, such as Half Life 2 -- 2 gigs of data. Every Counter Strike player starts downloading that. Riiiiiight.)
Now, you would think that they might have thought about scenarios like that, since their games are WILDLY popular at lan parties (as well as online). But no. You call them, you w