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The Internet Entertainment Games

P2P Solutions To Legal Game-Related Downloads? 45

Posted by simoniker from the lovely-legal-leeching dept.
[TASF]Overkill writes "As 'P2P' slowly becomes a synonym for 'illegal', the perfectly legitimate and still very useful capabilities of P2P emerge. Modifications, demos, trailers, and other game-related files are typically downloaded by a lot of users all at once, something that kills the client-server setup of most websites. Game Philez is using Gnutella, ED2k, and G2, to help users avoid the long lines at other download sites, and helping to ensure that P2P stays useful, even for the DMCA-fearing citizen." With legal game-related BitTorrent solutions like FileRush and GameTab also out there, is P2P a viable alternative to the subscription download services?
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P2P Solutions To Legal Game-Related Downloads? More

P2P Solutions To Legal Game-Related Downloads?

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  • It seems that the current thinking from the IDSA and other software publishers, developers and associations is 'If it can be used illegally, it's illegal, and will only be used by pirates'. BitTorrent and the like are being picked up independants, and are being used for some demos (ToEE over KaZaA, for example), but until the mainstream developers start to use it, it will always be 'fringe'. GameSpy and FileShack will still get their exclusives and that will keep P2P marginalized.
  • Massive games like EQ, UO, etc; stuff that gets patched a lot would benefit greatly by making use of an integrated bit torrent client. Consider that the EQ patch server was a single perma seed. Players with enough bandwidth would have the internal bit torrent client running in the background while playing and auto serve the patch to other people. People without enough bandwidth could simply disable the sharing feature or a system that detected bottlenecks could shut it off automatically.

    As a result, the co

  • P2P was synonymous with illegal from the get go. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Meat Blaster ( 578650 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2003 @11:02AM (#7219691)
    I'd argue that it's only now that it is making the slow climb to legitimacy, where one can argue with a straight face that it isn't just pirates using it.

    BitTorrent is the best business argument for not banning the concept of P2P outright; it's a far better distribution model than having your customers visit FilePlanet and sit in line to grab a patch or demo for your program. I very much think that BitTorrent-style distribution is on its way towards broad acceptance, provided that authentication of the file contents and (in the event of commercial content) of the user's payment for use the file is easy and ensured... and FurtherNet is a good demonstration that both should be possible.

  • Sure, the article is game-related, but BT has become popular for distributing Linux ISOs.

    And even though people talk about how independent musicians sharing their music over p2p is just a front for everyone swapping crappy metallica songs, I was able to find several copies of God Ate My Homework's songs on Kazaa. And thats legal usage too.
  • In part it seems like all the anti p2p attitude has pushed some schools to traffic shape the HELL out of every port greater than 1024.

    I know that at one school I formerly attended they even traffic shape AIM file transfers because "they make it too easy to send copyrighted files".

    This is done for the most part to make life easier on the school's sysadmins and legal department because rather than dealing with the problem of their users rights being trampled, they just make the problem go away.

    And I
  • I run GamePhilez, and I'm on the Shareaza alpha team (And BitTorrent now works REALLY well for me in Shareaza) and I'm not a big fan of "ripping down teh 1ndu5try!" However, due to The ESA's (www.theesa.com) automated search bot, I've been flagged twice as sharing illegal content. The Enemy Territory client, E3 footage, the Half-Life patch... It seems the words "Wolfenstein", "Doom", and "Half-Life" generated those cease and decist letters we all know so well. That's not very nice of them... Most ISPs, upon
  • is there some sort of bittorrent server that seeds files on request.
    because it's a pain to have a bittorrent client running for each download even if nobody is downloading it.
    • I looked into using BitTorrent for GamePhilez, but it's that sort of thing that discouraged me. Somewhere, you have to have the tracker and the main seed... That centralizes it a little too much for my tastes, and the model is weird. It works really well if there's a dedicated seed out there somewhere, but eh... No answer for your question. I think that's just how it goes.

  • Illicit uses can drive new technology (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2003 @11:42AM (#7220169) Homepage
    Let's name some older technologies and their original uses.

    Photography: Pornography
    Telephone: Illicit listening to live concerts
    Records: Illicit recording of live concerts
    VCR: Pornography
    Cinema: Pornography
    Cassette Tapes: Illicit recording of copyrighted audio
    World Wide Web: Pornography and Illicit playback of copyrighted audio
    Broadband: see above

    And now Peer-to-Peer distribution systems have evolved as a technology into something mature and usable. It only makes sense that the technology can and will be harnessed for legal ends, rather than the very human desires that drive most new technological adaptations. It's only a matter of time before the copy of Kill Bill volume 1 and 2 that you rent from Blockbuster.com and download to Media Player will be downloaded from other Media Player users who already have the movie.

    Gaming companies generally are the first adapters because they live and die on both emerging technologies and risk. When Apple realizes that they could add 5c to their 7c per song profit on songs sold through ITunes, they will certainly enable a controlled form of P2P sharing. When CinemaNow realizes the same thing, they too will jump at the chance to add profit where there once was a major fixed cost.

    Just as VCRs started as an uncontrollable piracy distribution medium, so too will P2P evolve into a powerful cash-earning medium for the content companies. It's not a matter of if, but when.

    And it seems that now is the time.

    • Step right up folks. Get your revisionist history right here. All you need compliments of cgenman. We can provide backup for any prediction of the future you want to make, just by making up the past to look like it will backup your future. How do we do it for the low-low price of nothing? Well its an internet message board of course, where any random person can make up any random past and given enough time, it will get modded up. So get it while there is still time!
  • Not to be self serving here at all, seriously. I work for a company (happypuppy.com), whose business model is the same as the subscription services (we were subscription also, until a week or two ago). The software we use for download acceleration, was developed and licensed from Onion Networks (who've been mentioned on ./ before). One of the differences with our technology (FileSwarmer as we call it) is that we have multiple servers, East and West, populated with the game demos already. This coutners s
    • HappyPuppy is no longer subscription?! Yippee! You just got a visitor back...
    • I don't understand why the big dogs (Ha, get it? :-P) develop their own in-house solutions or outsource for some proprietary solution. You could be just as well served by using existing standards. All publishers really need to do is post a magnet link, and regardless of whether they have a dedicated backend or not, that link is useful to a wide variety of clients. They can even include that backend if they want, for a significant boost in seeding speed. This is exactly what GamePhilez did before we changed
      • Oh yeah, and to clarify... I'm not a big fan of Torrents. They're still too centralized. :-) Hence my use of Shareaza and G2/ED2k/Gnutella.

  • costs (Score:2, Interesting)

    by anakin876 ( 612770 )
    I haven't seen anyone mention costs here yet. I am on a 15 GB transfer limit here, and while I realize that many other people have "unlimited" transfer capabilites (as to total down and uploaded) if enough people were to switch to bittorrent style transfers, how long would it take before these "unlimited" system became very limited? Some of the cable providers are aqlready experimenting with capping off their "excessive bandwidth" users...... there are costs associated with this beyond what Fileplanet and
    • Many ISPs do supposedly locally mirror popular files and cache high-demand objects. Valve claims that with Steam, several ISPs are hosting the steam cache because they can keep the load on their lines more localized. Yeah, P2P isn't too hot for those in the UK and others on a restricted line, but it seems to me that any company that now tried to set up a transfer limit would be doing itself in due to the availability of other service providers. They would have to do it all at once to avoid going out of bus
      • unfortunately in the housing complexes here near BYU (Provo, Utah USA area) part of the rent agreement usually involves not making any holes in the walls. The telephones are all provided through a central service (so getting DSL requires installing a new line) and getting a cable modem can prove problematic.....I'm not sure how many other areas are similar to this, but here in Provo most of the Apartment complexes are like this. It is off campus housing (not a dorm) but the university still controls some
  • they're the leading online gaming presence (in the non MMORPG category), and routinely have massive downloadable content / updates. (going from an original HL to one of the current mods requires a 300+ MB update).

    the recent steam downloading debacle is a perfect example of why this should be done. Valve releases a small steam client and expects people to download the content they need. Each download is in the range of the hundreds of megabytes. So what happens? Steam servers get hammered by the 100,0
  • Not that I particularily like Steam from Valve Software yet, but it may be a decent beginning for something useful.
    Anyway, when they rolled Steam out, their servers were immediately DOSed by CounterStrike players who were trying to upgrade. After having read the description on the Steam homepage [steampowered.com] I had assumed that Steam would be using a P2P scheme for content delivery. I geuss they didn't think of that. :(
    In my opinion, their "content servers" should have provided an original copy and checksums, and the

  • Valve's Steam content delivery service is going to become a P2P application at some point in the near future. This has been a feature planned from the get-go, it just has yet to be implemented. Much maligned though Steam is, this will dramatically affect load times, content updates, bug fixes for the better.

  • I know some games like Baseball Mogul BaseballMogul [sportsmogul.com] have put up their Demos on Kazaa a few years ago. Might be a good way for a small developer to gain some exposure ans save on bandwidth costs.
  • I've only used BitTorrent (BT) a few times, but as far as I can see problems occur when something is freshly released. For example, recently when Red Orchestra was mentioned on /. I thought i'd download it. Saw the BT link within the comments and tried to give it a go. Gave up after 30 minutes when I'd downloaded 10MB of 250 or whatever and uploaded 25MB. Got in a FilePlanet queue and had the whole thing in 60 minutes, including a 25 minute wait in the queue.

    The problem, as far as I can tell, when somet
    • I saw this too, with the release of the Natural Selection mod. I'm not sure why, but the BitTorrent release suffered not-so-hot download speeds, and the Shareaza (g2) release which had more downloaders, was constantly applauded. We had 100 kB/s dedicated to our file releases back then, and that was apparently more than enough to keep everyone happy. I was very satisfied with the flash-release system of that file. Unfortunately, we no longer have any dedicated mirrors or users, a factor that as you've pointe

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