Saturday, October 15, 2005
Mythic stumble
Mythic Entertainment's first digital distribution foray, the release of Darkness Rising, an expansion pack to their Dark Age of Camelot MMO, has come a cropper.
From File Rush News:
From File Rush News:
"Mythic Entertainment, like any other newcomer to the digital distribution scene, could do nothing but look on in awe as both their BitTorrent and direct download hosts were flooded with users after upping their fourth retail expansion to "Live" status on Tuesday...Fileburst (their direct download host) ran extremely low on bandwidth and users received corrupt installation files after trying to download the game via BitTorrent."If anything, this teaches us the valuable lesson that established and proven systems (Steam or otherwise) are not to be sniffed at when converting a popular title to DD, particuarly a MMO where players are so active.
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I'd term BitTorrent both established and proven. It works quite well for Blizzard, both for their beta distribution and for their major patches. (The site you quoted also misreferenced the complaints about BitTorrent; it wasn't causing corrupted downloads. Rather, customers couldn't figure out how to use a BitTorrent client—something that would be the case with any non-browser-based DD system.)
For something like this, I think that Mythic probably went with the best available option. They needed to distribute an installer, something that current DD systems aren't really suited for. Steam and its ilk are geared towards content management, not distribution. In fact, this is why I was surprised to hear about Zombie Movie's release....
For something like this, I think that Mythic probably went with the best available option. They needed to distribute an installer, something that current DD systems aren't really suited for. Steam and its ilk are geared towards content management, not distribution. In fact, this is why I was surprised to hear about Zombie Movie's release....
I take your point for BT, but I don't see what necessarily seperates content management and distribution. There's no reason why you couldn't have Steam download and run a standard installer, aside from the superficial fact that the current client would have to extract it from the GCF to execute.
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