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E3 The Internet

Prey To Be Digitally Distributed 67

Posted by Zonk from the shadow-of-steam dept.
Gamasutra has word that the Human Head/3D Realms title Prey will be digitally distributed in a manner similar to the Steam service, though not over Steam itself. The Game xStream service, the chosen distribution channel, seems to offer improvements over Steam as well as convenience. From the article: "Gamers will be able to pre-order and pre-load Prey onto their hard drives, ready for instant activation and play upon the official release date...Or, after the official release, players will be able to buy the game and begin playing in minutes, as if the full game was already downloaded. This is what sets Game xStream apart from anything else the industry has seen."
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Prey To Be Digitally Distributed More

Prey To Be Digitally Distributed

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  • Will it be cheaper? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by maddh ( 608481 )
    They should save alot of money by skipping publishing and packaging. Will the savings be passed on to us? Also there will probably be some gray area in 'owning' the copy. If it still costs $50 i'd like to have an actual copy that I can back up, or sell later, etc. All the same questions from the HL2 release.
    • Its probably more of a shift in cost instead of an elimination of a cost. Now you need lots of high bandwidth servers instead of high throughput cd duplicators. Then you also need an IT staff to make sure the systems stay up and running.
      • but you also get to dump a publisher like Sierra taking their cut, you get to cut the cost of the box's, manuals, CD's, the cost of transportation and physical distribution, also you cut out bestbuy and their markup. Plus you never produce a single copy more than is sold, no overstock.
        Seems to me you just need to hire some programmers, buy a few servers, and rent a fat data pipe.
        • Now imagine if they offset the bandwidth with a bittorrent download.
          • Someone's going to do something like that, with a really great game, and it'll be a big deal. It probably won't be one of the major studios, maybe an unknown company with a good idea for a game. It'll be cheap for the amount of gameplay that you get, convenient to download, and they'll make bucketloads of money. It already happens on a small scale with shareware. Apparently the Snood guy made plenty off of that game. But it'll take a mid-sized company to make a higher caliber game that everyone really takes
          • Better yet, build a bittorrent client/decentralized tracker type thing into the Game xStream client, abstracting the torrent-ness of it, but still getting the same effect. That'd be pretty sweet.
          • Maybe you missed this news.. the creator of BitTorrent got hired by Valve to help improve their networking/downloading..

            http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/6278 [techreport.com]
      • Now you need lots of high bandwidth servers instead of high throughput cd duplicators.

        Or a medium bandwith server and a bittorent tracker.
      • What I'm worried about is how do they advertise beyond the initial hype. As it stands now, when I want a game, I go to the gamestop and look over the shelves at all the games that are available.

        If every pc based studio goes to its own steam clone distribution method, it will be hard to know what games are new, and how to differentiate games which were made by quality companies from fly by night studios just looking to make a quick buck.
  • "A key to Game xStream's appeal is its dynamic streaming, which takes place in the background even after the game has been started."

    Hope you don't go beating levels too quickly.
    • And Steam even does this aswell, if you start downloading counter-strike you will be able to play before all maps and such are downloaded..
    • I don't know, I've played streaming games (Serious Sam Demo). It was a couple years ago, but it worked supprisingly well.

  • Am I the only one that doesn't like Steam? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by yotto ( 590067 ) on Thursday May 19, 2005 @04:28PM (#12582369) Homepage
    I hate Steam, from the little I used it (Original HL/Counterstrike only). I don't like it as a distribution method or a game playing method. When I uninstalled it, it was using a GIG of my hard drive. A gig!
    • You're far from the only one.

      I disliked it so much that I didn't buy HL2, and I'd been waiting for it for ages..
      • About the only thing I didn't (and still don't) like about Steam is that you *have* to log in and authenticate to the servers before you're allowed to play anything that you have associated with your Steam account (in other words, all Valve games).

        Sure, you can "go offline", but this usually involves either unplugging your network cable, disabling the network connection under Windows, or screwing around with Steam files on your HDD.

        Why can't they just include a switch, button, or check box that says "Play
    • My Unreal 2k4 folder is 8.3 gigs.

      What's your point? Steam is just a distribution method. You have to get the game on your HD some way, either by CD's or by downloading it.

      I bought HL2 over Steam and never had a single problem. I know there were a lot of issues with it when it was first introduced to replace WON, but I had grown tired of HL and its mods by that point, so I missed out. My first introduction to steam was when I bought HL2 a week before release date. It preloaded everything, and that day
    • I really like Steam for the most part, though when trying to play games offline can be a big hassle. I also love being able to pay the game developers the full price of the game instead of giving 90% to the publisher and retailer. If they lower the price in the future, thats fine. But I'm content paying the same, giving more to the developers.
    • Steam is a good idea gone bad. The good is that it offers digital distribution. Why is that good? Distribution is one of the few reasons that game development houses require publishers. It is very difficult for an independant company to get a game on store shelves, if not impossible. If digital distribution becomes standard, the publishers will lose some degree of control which will allow development houses more freedom. I might be stretching, but services like Steam and xStream could help make games in
      • The extra features it provides (the user interface) are used by the game. So for
        the constant 20MB being sucked away from your machine, each game doesn't need to
        load 20MB of custom user interface code full of it's own unique bugs (it just
        inherits Steam's - and whatever skin you applied).

        Steam's GUI is used as part of the Source Engine, basically.

        By the way if you can think of better DRM I am sure Valve would love to hear it.
        There is nothing as reliable as handshaking with an internet server, besides of
        cour
        • I really don't see how you could reasonably protect IP with biometric. Someone just has to write a patch which forces the game to think the biometric stamp or whatever has been verified. Biometrics may be useful for blocking access to your computer, or even as a seed for encrypting your private data, but once you give that key to someone else (I.E the customer) then the only thing stopping them from giving that key (or some reasonable software facsimile.)

          It seems about the only reasonably uncrackable i

          • I'm not sure how they'd do it with biometrics but there must be a fairly
            reliable way to link some biometric data (iris pattern, fingerprint, DNA
            sequence? :) to a cryptographic key.

            Said cryptographic key can then be used to decode the music or movie. With
            smartcards this works REALLY well and is the BEST authentication because
            there really is only one smartcard for you, and you had to plug it into the
            system to get logged in to even read the filesystem with your music on.

            Getting everyone to buy a $60 smartcar
            • Problem with that is then every single piece of media that you buy would have to be encrypted using that key. Could no longer mass produce CDs or DVDs because, well, every single one would need to be custom. Would be cost prohibitive for most retailers (Best Buy, Walmart, etc) and doing online orders would kind of defeat the purpose of biometrics, since you have to actually be in their presence to verify that you aren't somehow faking the system. You'd essentially become limited to buying from a kiosk wh
    • I may be in the minority, but i actually like Steam.
      It allows me to have my games wherever i want them, whenever i want (as long as i have access to a fat pipe).
      I travel often enough and it is quite nice to be able to setup a download for a game the night before and play the next day, anywhere, whitout having to bother about actually packing the CD.

      Sure, if the service goes bust, i'll be shafted, but until that time comes, i get lots of usage. I installed at least 4 copies of my Steam games, on 4 different
    • Wow, a gig of memory is the less than the size of CS and HL!

      Call me when it gets to 8 gigs. Easily with Steam's content library, and/or 3rd party mods, like Natural Selection, or Science & Industry or whatever. Then there is the addition of maps which will bring it up.

      This would happen whether you used Steam or not though.

      Steam has several great improvements, content downloading. The biggest problem of steam is probably that it takes up memory, roughly 24 MB in RAM. Also standardizing versions. Frank

  • The future of gaming... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Satertek ( 708058 ) <brian@satertek.info> on Thursday May 19, 2005 @04:29PM (#12582377) Homepage
    ...is a new distribution service icon in my taskbar for every game developer.
  • ...just posing as a FPS.

    A massively complicated character generation process could explain how you could be "playing" within minutes of buying the game...:-)
  • Prey was announced back in 1996 after duke nukem. What does 3d realms do all day?

  • Prey To Be Digitally Distributed? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Very strange headline, but OK, I will:

    Dear Lord, please make me digitally distributed. Thank You.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday May 19, 2005 @04:39PM (#12582487)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Yes, I can't wait to play it on my BitBoys Oy Glaze3D card. Why even bother with a Voodoo3?

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by Jahf ( 21968 )
    and how long ago was Prey announced? Wasn't this the Quake (1 or 2, I forget) killer from long ago?
  • Look at these screenshots! [gamespot.com]
  • Erm, didn't Steam allow exactly that? If you pre-ordered HL2, it downloaded all the content over the month before the release date, and then at midnight, barring their servers falling over, you could play straight away.
    • Yes, steam did everything they are talking about.

      You could pre-order HL2 and download all the content, then they give you the decryption keys on the official release day. The annoying thing about that was that it insisted on decrypting everything before you could play...

      You could download the bare minimum (engine, some basic models, etc) and fire up the game. It would continue downloading as you played. The disadvantage is that neither HL nor HL2 provide progress bars on all those "loading" screens, an
      • But, the data is sorted into accounts in such a way that I don't think you can simply copy the folder from Program Files to a friend and have them login under their own account...

        You can copy stuff directly - I think it's just a matter of copying the whole Steam installation (via Ethernet, carrier-pigeon, floppy disk, IP-over-flatulence, whatever), deleting clientregistry.blob, starting Steam again and logging in with the new account.

        Oh, one more thing -- if you're going to embed stuff, embed GOOD stuf
        • it's probably a better idea to rely on something that's guaranteed to be available on all Windows machines than an optional 3rd-party browser like Firefox

          Like whatever you install with Steam? If they wanted to insist that you have an up-to-date Firefox or Mozilla, they could do it -- and even provide the distribution means.

          or including a potentially-outdated Mozilla rendering engine.

          Most apps embed Gecko instead of linking to it, which makes sense -- after all, if you're using Mozilla, anything you n

          • Like whatever you install with Steam? If they wanted to insist that you have an up-to-date Firefox or Mozilla, they could do it -- and even provide the distribution means.

            Shut that guy up!

            Seriously, don't give them ideas. I use Firefox, but if I installed a game and it insisted on (amongst other things) that I install a particular web browser, it would just annoy the hell out of me.

            I get wound up enough that the Steam icon that sits in the tray has UI that uses kewl skinz, which is sitting ther

            • You'd prefer that they redo or embed everything, so that five games take five times the space?

              There's a reason we have SHARED LIBRARIES. Too bad that translates into DLL HELL on Windows.
  • There must be a way, because nobody will buy a non-online game you can't play without being online.
  • his is what sets Game xStream apart from anything else the industry has seen.

    Sorry, but I still can't understand what makes this service different than Steam. Looks like the marketing people have been locked up with their game in 3D Realms' basement for ten years.

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