Game Distribution Platforms Becoming Annoyingly Common

The Escapist's Shamus Young recently posted an article complaining about the proliferation of distribution platforms and social networks for video games. None of the companies who make these are "quite sure how games will be sold and played ten years from now," he writes, "but they all know they want to be the ones running the community or selling the titles." Young continues, "Remember how these systems usually work: The program sets itself up to run when Windows starts, and it must be running if you want to play the game. If you follow this scheme to its logical conclusion, you'll see that the system tray of every gaming PC would eventually end up clogged with loaders, patchers, helpers, and monitors. Every publisher would have a program for serving up content, connecting players, managing digital licenses, performing patches, and (most importantly) selling stuff. Some people don't mind having 'just one more' program running in the background. But what happens when you have programs from Valve, Stardock, Activision, 2k Games, Take-Two, Codemasters, Microsoft, Eidos, and Ubisoft? Sure, you could disable them. But then when you fire the thing up to play a game, it will want to spend fifteen minutes patching itself and the game before it will let you in. And imagine how fun it would be juggling accounts for all of them."

Comments

Re:Steam and Electronic Arts

[Anonymous Coward]

Gabe did not say that. There is no universal decryption key for the system they use. He said he expects he would make available a method to enable the games if the masters went offline. His wording was careful to avoid a legally binding statement. The reality is that it would not be in his control if they went belly up, as it would be a trustee's call with the creditors as the IP would be under their control. Something short of chapter 11 and it would be factors such as goodwill upon deciding there is no reason to continue the system for a given product. In other words there is no IP left that is profitable and as a gesture of goodwill and if within his control, it would likely happen. End of story.