You know, when people are so rabid that they’re actually willing to pay money to beta-test games, is there any incentive whatsoever to release a game in finished condition?
No, there isn’t.
A profound insight, and a sad testament to the sheer lack of self-control by the gaming public.
Just because you can fork over cash to play a hot game early doesn’t mean you should. There are ramifications for this type of behavior. Keep that in mind the next time you install a game and you find it’s filled with bugs. Not only are the devs and execs to blame, but our self-gratifying fanboy brethren as well.
[size=1]Fuck, I really hate using the term fanboy.[/size]
Yes, in the short distance it’s true. In the long distance things change.[/quote]
What does that even mean? In the “long distance” things change because by then the game should already have been released!
To be fair, you aren’t really paying for the WoW beta, you are paying for a subscription to Fileplanet, which comes with more than just the WoW beta. I don’t see how this is any different from buying a magazine because the demo disc has something you are interested in. You aren’t being charged for the demo, but merely for the manner of distribution, and you get more than just that one demo for your money.
Seriously, you aren’t paying for the demo or the beta, you are paying for the costs to host the download, which are considerable. There are plenty of demos that are only available through pay download services like Fileplanet or Gamespot Complete these days, mostly because it costs a lot of money to host a popular download. If that’s not a part of your marketing budget, then you have to pay for it somehow.
Nah, FilePlanet demos find their way to every hole in the net. I can download them from ed2k and someone is bound to torrent them (God, I love torrents, more companies should encourge them).
FilePlanet is a disgusting business which tried to get as much subscribers as possible. Well, duh, but my point is that because of this they don’t use torrents, which would helped the load on their servers and let people wait less. But it’s not their interest to let people wait less.
Anyway, in betas, they actually sell me the cd key. I find it disgusting that game companies co-operate with them and work against their fanbase.
I always appriciated the companies which actually gave their exclusives not to gaming magazines or “fileplanets” but to theit loyal fansites. (Which by the way contribute to a lot of hype which should be those companies goals)
Yes, but you have to be a subscriber to activate this or any other exclusive beta/test/demo. They use digital rights management to make sure of it.
FilePlanet is a disgusting business which tried to get as much subscribers as possible. Well, duh, but my point is that because of this they don’t use torrents, which would helped the load on their servers and let people wait less. But it’s not their interest to let people wait less.
Obviously, they don’t want to make it too easy to use the free service. And if you’re paying, you want better reliability and speed than you’d get from a peer to peer system like torrents. Speed and reliability are really good reasons to subscribe.
I always appriciated the companies which actually gave their exclusives not to gaming magazines or “fileplanets” but to theit loyal fansites.
Fan sites are ill-equipped to handle the distribution of a massively popular 2 gigabyte file. Even just a torrent tracker. Also, I imagine that when publishers go exclusive with the FilePlanets and GameSpots of the world they bundle it with other services, like advertising and editorial coverage. Fan sites don’t reach nearly as many people.
And anyway, it is roughly estimated that for every retail copy of a game there are at least 2 pirated copies. And I believe quite a lot people download Doom 3 warezed copies, some of them even before the game hit the stores around where they live, and some with the simple intention of not paying for games.
As much as I know, the pirating community doesn’t hold fast vroadband servers. It is being published with simple p2p and primitive servers, and guess what? it works.
I honestly think less of fileplanet subscribers, people should pay for what is supposed to be free, and almost always except the last examples, can be gotten for free.
Sorry dude, but upstream bandwidth is NOT free. On poorly seeded files or p2p networks sharing uncommon files, you will not see a whole lot of speed. That said, if they used BitTorrent on the “hot files” for free users they would alleviate a lot of their bandwidth issues. The problem is that Gamespy is trying to tie into their Gamespy Arcade dealie, and therefore it isn’t even in their best interest to let people avoid sitting in lines and watching ads (for those who don’t use supertrick or ad block).
Why, exactly, is the service that they provide supposed to be free? Because it was free during the dot.com years when VC’s were throwing money away into it like crazy?
People can wrap their head around the “costs money” part. It’s the “sucks” part that people have problems with. Fileplanet kinda-sorta worked back when the majority of us still had dialup, but it has completely failed to keep up. Back then it took 2 hours for 20 megs because our connections sucked, while now it takes 2 hours for 20 megs just because of the huge wait times. We did our thing by upgrading to DSL and cable, but sites like Fileplanet essentially want to make us pay MORE to be able to use them.
Maybe the cost of bandwidth would be slightly reduced if GameSpy would stop dicking around with server browsers that are utterly useless or paying for exclusives and tried making something people actually want.
It’s the opposite. The “all you can eat for free” model (a.k.a., “advertisement supported”) stopped working for 3 reasons.
First, files got a LOT bigger. In the beginning it was all Half-Life maps, Quake maps, and Doom wads that were only a few hundred k. Then demos that were tens of megabytes. Then demos that were hundreds of megs. Then betas that were a gigabyte. Then TWO gigabytes! This drove bandwidth costs through the roof.
Second, Internet access became more widespread, especially broadband as you said. This meant a LOT more people came to the site and gorged on the buffet. This drove bandwidth costs through the roof.
Third, gaming got more and more popular. Again, this meant more traffic and again bandwidth went through the roof.
There were a lot of roofs on that place, but in the space of a few months it had become prohibitively expensive for a small company like GameSpy to keep putting new ones on every month. Adding enough free servers/bandwidth to satiate the ravenous masses was impossible. The waiting in line feature was a triage that allowed the place to stay open. The subscription model was what actually made flourish and grow.
We did our thing by upgrading to DSL and cable, but sites like Fileplanet essentially want to make us pay MORE to be able to use them.
If it hadn’t “kept up” it would have closed down. It’s just that the “I pay for Internet access so averything on the 'net should be free” crowd don’t like the direction it took. Note that Amazon doesn’t give you your books for free, either.
Incidentally, have you noticed how many copycat sites/systems there are out there? FileShack, FileFront, IGN Downloads (before the merge). They copied because it worked really well and was one of maybe two or three ways to adapt.
Maybe the cost of bandwidth would be slightly reduced if GameSpy would stop dicking around with server browsers that are utterly useless…
Eh? This seems like a total non sequiter. The two have nothing to do with each other and the bandwidth costs of running the server browsers is a drop in the ocean relative to operating a site like FilePlanet.
…or paying for exclusives and tried making something people actually want.
You’re not in line with the facts. Those exclusives are massively popular. People DO want them.
You do realize that everyone upgrading to DSL and cable made things more expensive, not less, for file hosting sites, right? More people with broadband means more people downloading huge files, and more of them. I’m not sure that people understand exactly how expensive bandwidth gets at that scale (hint: very expensive). When I was at CGM, back when CG Online was still running, we agreed to host an exclusive demo once. I can’t remember the exact figures, but the final bandwidth tab was in the tens of thousands of dollars. For one file. Needless to say, we never did that again.
The simple truth is that when you use bandwidth, someone has to pay for it, no matter how much you’d like to believe that it’s “supposed to be free.” And peer to peer programs aren’t the magical free solution that folks like you and Shiroko think they are, they merely shift the costs to ISPs, who become de facto file hosting services. Given the steadily growing popularity of both broadband and file sharing, I expect to see ISPs eventually either shift away from flat-rate broadband subscriptions, or apply monthly bandwidth limits to their subscribers, like you get with web hosting services. So you can boycott Fileplanet and similar sites all you want, but someone has to pay these costs, and if you think that’s not going to end up being you, then you are fooling yourself.
I have noticed. What i was trying to get at is that it’s not a completely terrible model period, but a terrible model when it completely fails to keep up with demand. Fileshack i can actually tolerate: wait a few minutes during a rush to offset the lack of bandwidth and read every so often about how they’re bumping up capacity. A very far cry from FilePlanet’s bullshit 300 minute lines. If i don’t want that generally reasonable wait, or if i want to download faster than 100K/s, i pay. No big deal, since it’s more of a case of paying for priority than it is paying to be able to download anything this century.
Now, maybe the 'shack doesn’t have the sheer number of visitors that FilePlanet gets. Or, maybe it just doesn’t sprawl itself out in a thousand useless directions with a thousand useless “PlanetX” sites and an equal number of useless forums to go with them. Whatever it is, FilePlanet sucks. What it’s supposed to do, it does it as poorly as possible. It can’t keep up and it’s not changing.
[quote]Maybe the cost of bandwidth would be slightly reduced if GameSpy would stop dicking around with server browsers that are utterly useless…
Eh? This seems like a total non sequiter. The two have nothing to do with each other and the bandwidth costs of running the server browsers is a drop in the ocean relative to operating a site like FilePlanet.
…or paying for exclusives and tried making something people actually want.
You’re not in line with the facts. Those exclusives are massively popular. People DO want them.[/quote]
Yeah. That was a single sentence for a reason. Thanks.
What people want, GSI doesn’t produce. What they do produce, nobody wants. I’m thinking that instead of wasting resources on GameSpy Arcade -which is used primarily by people who don’t know any better- they could, you know, make something that’s actually good for once as an additional form of revenue. Exclusives themselves, in addition to pissing everyone off, just add to the bandwidth pressure. You don’t start asking for more gasoline when you’re already on fire.
I don’t really care. You do realize that waiting 269 minutes for a 10 meg file completely removes the point of having broadband, right? If this becomes the norm, then something is fundamentally FUBAR’d. And coincidentally, fixing or understanding it is NMFP.
It is your problem in that the only way to “fix” it is for you to help defray the costs of downloads (which, as I said, you are going to end up doing eventually one way or the other). Fileplanet makes you wait in order to limit the amount of bandwidth they provide to people that don’t pay them for it. If you have a subscription, then you don’t have to wait at all–all downloads start instantly. If you don’t think you should have to pay to download files at all, then I guess that is YFP. And you didn’t read my last post.
