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PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

Atari, ToEE, And P2P Distribution For Games? 39

Posted by simoniker from the try-before-you-buy dept.
Txiasaeia writes "In a very strange turn of events, it seems as if Kazaa (and only the 'official' Kazaa, not any of its non-spyware derivatives) is offering a copy of Atari's new PC RPG, Temple of Elemental Evil for download. What makes this particular case unusual is the fact that, once you download the 6-hour time-limited 'demo', you can unlock the full game for $49.95. While Steam has been doing this with Counterstrike, Kazaa is footing the bill for the bandwidth for ToEE, which makes it one of the first times that a major game publishing house has embraced a P2P client as part of its official distribution network. Is this latest move by Atari an attempt to garner media attention (especially with the RIAA and Kazaa in the news), or are they seriously embracing P2P as a legitimate source for game distribution?"
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Atari, ToEE, And P2P Distribution For Games? More

Atari, ToEE, And P2P Distribution For Games?

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  • Sweet! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MImeKillEr ( 445828 ) on Thursday September 18, 2003 @07:15AM (#6993186) Homepage Journal
    It's based on TSR's old module [deigames.com] by the same name.

  • The torrent (Score:4, Informative)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Thursday September 18, 2003 @07:18AM (#6993203) Homepage Journal
    The bit torrent is 10,000 times better for this sort of thing. Nobody who knows better will go download the spyware laden official kazaa just to get this demo. But just about anybody will get the torrent if they don't already have it. And the torrent works better for this sort of thing, since it is a one time extreme popularity explosion.

    • Re:The torrent (Score:2, Interesting)

      by torpor ( 458 )
      I admire bittorrent, but I have such a very difficult time ever *finding* anything on that network.

      How do you handle this? Surely a 'google of torrent' application would be *The* next killer Internet thing?

      Also - I'm a DSL user, can I become a bit-torrent node easily enough? I'll run whatever OS I need to be able to serve my own bittorrent stuff ... as an artist, nothing could be better or more worth the effort!
      • There are A LOT of sites out there with bittorrent links. Search google. I don't really like BT,it totally saturates my bandwidth since I have a very asymetric connection...
        • Do a search for the Experimental client, it has bandwidth limiting stuff if you so desire. Limiting your upstream will affect your downstream, but if it's killing your net one way or the other then whatever works :P
      • BitTorrent isn't a network; that's why the concept of searching it doesn't make sense.

        The Google of BitTorrent is Google. Of course, sites serving illegal content via BT may not want to be indexed by Google.

  • Not a bad idea... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bjb ( 3050 ) * on Thursday September 18, 2003 @07:19AM (#6993209) Homepage Journal
    Frankly, this is good not only for P2P by showing a legitimate use, but also for the company distributing the software. First, the company can host it in one place and foots the bill for the bandwidth doing that. Next, someone downloads it to their machine. As long as the consumer keeps the download on their machine (which probably happens more than expected), future downloads can be made from that person's machine, using that person's bandwidth instead of the company's. Quite a good plan, actually. If anything, the company at least saves some percentage of download bandwidth, since at least a handful of them will not be on their bill.

    If this proves successful, it will only help keep P2P around for a lot longer than the RIAA could hope.

  • 1 2 3 profit (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1. Download game
    2. play for 6-hours, set clock back 6-hours
    3. PROFIT!

  • Correction (Score:4, Interesting)

    by emj ( 15659 ) on Thursday September 18, 2003 @07:42AM (#6993334) Journal
    Steam is not a P2P application, it is a way for Valve to control which game you have installed and which games you are allowed to play on the internet with. When SteamBeta was released the first time (~ yr ago) it maxed out the 700Mbps it had allocated, and now when stable they maxed out yet again. Compare this to f.scarywaters.com statistics [scarywater.net] where the slashdot crowd alone managed to get it to 1.4Gbps (the double) in less than 3hrs... Now P2P certainly isn't the solution for commercial vendors, but for amatuers sure..
    • Not yet anyway

      FISKER_Q: you've said you wanted P2P in the steam, is that going to be a reality?

      greg_coomer: Right now we're wishing it already was a reality... down the road it probably will be.

      halflife2.net [halflife2.net]

      BT is the way to go. Check out transfer on the full installer 1+TB

      gametab [gametab.com]

      • Yeah but seeing how little steam they are putting behind this application, it will take a REALLY long while for us to reach that milestone. They should just use BT, that would be wonderfull.

  • New? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Rutje ( 606635 )
    Isn't this what we've been calling shareware for the last decade??
    Nothing new under the sun...
    Hence it must be a commercial marketing 'jump on the RIAA/Kazaa/P2P shady legal bandwagon'...

  • KaZaA is a P2P program... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JonoPlop ( 626887 ) <meNO@SPAMJonathonMah.com> on Thursday September 18, 2003 @08:49AM (#6993969) Homepage
    "KaZaA will foot the bill for bandwidth?" It's a peer-to-peer program; the users supply the files over their own bandwidth. KaZaA pays nothing.
    • How do you explain, then, that you can ONLY get this file from Kazaa, and not Kazaa K++, Lite, or any of the other variations? It's because you're downloading from Kazaa servers -- believe it or not, they exist!

      • How do you explain, then, that you can ONLY get this file from Kazaa, and not Kazaa K++, Lite, or any of the other variations? It's because you're downloading from Kazaa servers -- believe it or not, they exist!/blockquote It's really only available from the official KaZaA? If you want to distribute a file, why not make it as available as possible? And also, if there are official KaZaA servers, KaZaA / Sharman Networks must have agreed to put files on there in the first place, right?

  • Why not BitTorrent? If you want to offer up one large file for download, that would be my choice.
  • ... special releases of games recently, and I think.. "Uh, not everyone has broadband!" What about the rest of us who don't have the ablity to get a high speed connection at home?

    Dialup's painful enough, but add the fact that we're being teased by all these special promos and releases? I'm going to go find a sword to fall on now!

  • The idea for distributing the trial version of a game via P2P isn't that new. Actually ID did this with DOOM back in the old days. Then it was via the usual shareware channels but ultimately by swapping floppies. Only difference now is that we have an application layer protocoll for it. Way to go! It sure as hell worked in 1996!
  • and only the 'official' Kazaa, not any of its non-spyware derivatives

    I don't understand how they can limit it to only the 'official' Kazaa, since the non-spyware versions are just as much a P2P app as the official one?

    Either the parenthetical is irrelevant or the program isn't really being distributed by means of P2P.
    • Well regardless, people have been saying they can't find it on Kazaa Lite, even knowing the exact file name.

      The link in Kazaa proper is on the Kazaa front page, which is usually redirected to somewhere else in the variants.

      And if reading the forums is an indication, yes people are downloading Kazaa, downloading ToEE, uninstalling Kazaa, and running AdAware. But mostly it's the Euro crowd that won't get the game for another few weeks by normal means.

      • Re:Only the 'official' Kazaa? (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        wouldn't you figgure that a kazaa lite user could launch kazaa(normal) and get it and share over kazaa lite? thus giving it to everyone else?
  • I downloaded it using Kazaa Lite. My friend gave me the URL that the official version uses for its homepage. I then took that and made it the default webpage of my Kazaa. I followed the link from the resulting page and the file began downloading. I'd like to note, however, that it took me nine hours to download a six hour demo. o_0
  • Yeah, well http://www.two-degrees.com/ is a product I checked out at the Austin Game Conference and convinced my company to license for distributing large game files. While it won't allow people to share non-approved files, it does provide really fast and easy downloads of legitimate releases. It's supposed to be even better than BitTorrent, but we'll see about that when we actually begin distributing through it in October.

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