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Yahoo!
Launches
September 23, 2002 |
Yahoo! has built a lot of things in the past. Beginning as a list of
websites circulated through email and newsgroups, it could be said that
Yahoo! is a good portion of the reason the World Wide Web took off the
way it did we wouldnt be surfing around so much if we had to rely on
JoeBobs List of Kickass Links to get the job done. The company has
always been on the cutting edge; from their unique ad campaigns to their
development of community-oriented online spaces, they have done a lot to
enhance our experience of the Web and to bring new users online.
Yahoo! has also done a lot for the gaming world already, although
theyre probably not fully aware of it. Their online games service,
Yahoo! Games, brings in 8 million players and serves 4.5 billion minutes
of gametime each month, and we cant help but think that Interactive
Digital Software Association (IDSA) statistics about gaming (such as the
fact that 48% of gamers are women or the average age of a gamer is 28)
would be skewed in a very different direction if they did not include
the diverse crowd that Yahoo! Games pulls in. The site peaks each day
with about 150 thousand simultaneous players. Many of these gamers are
of the elusive "casual" variety, playing pool, chess, and hearts
routinely, perhaps even compulsively. Anyone who has played at Yahoo!
Games can attest to the quality of the experience there are always
plenty of opponents, it doesnt take too much time to load, and the
games work reliably. What more could Yahoo! do for the game industry?
How could they make themselves more of a destination? By filling one of
the voids weve experienced for a long time.
Historically, there has been no real outlet for renting PC games.
Some local videogame stores, and even large retail chains like Hastings,
have toyed around with the idea, but nobody has really made it stick.
There are too many issues involved that dont normally come with renting
console titles, and the big one is an issue of piracy. Stores instantly
hurt their own sales of popular games if people with PCs can rent the
game, install it at home, perhaps copy it (or just leave it installed on
the machine), and return the title well in advance of the due date. The
need to actually purchase the game is instantly removed and while
rentals do great, sales drop off. This is a bad thing.
Yahoo!
hopes to work around the troubles of renting PC games in the real world
by doing it online. Today (Monday, September 23, 2002), they are
launching their Yahoo! Games On Demand service, which allows broadband
PC users to rent titles at prices very competitive with your local video
store. Yahoo! has overcome security issues by using a custom client for
playing the games, so you never download the whole package, and this has
allowed them to team up with some of the biggest publishers in the
business. Currently there are 40 titles available for rent at
http://gamesondemand.yahoo.com, and they are very much worth the
download.
Here
is how it works: You login to the Yahoo! Games On Demand service and pay
for a rental. You have four choices: A three day rental will cost you
$4.95 and that allows you to play a single game as much as youd like
for three days. You can also get a package deal in 3, 5, or 10 games,
which cost $9.95, $12.95, or $14.95 respectively. These packages allow
you to play a number of games for a full month. For example, if you sign
up for the 3 game deal, then you get three "slots" to fill for a month.
You may play Civilization III the first week, get some Serious Sam in
the second week, and then spend the last half of the month bouncing
between those two games in addition to Deus Ex, which you never got
around to finishing. The 10 game package, at less than half the cost of
a new PC title, is a phenomenal deal for the price of a cup of coffee
each day you can play games until your eyes bleed.
The pricing and availability of these games makes it affordable and
enticing to play some of the older titles Yahoo! Games On Demand
supports, and according to Dan Hart, Senior Director of Yahoo!
Games and Entertainment, supporting catalog titles is a major goal of the service.
Increasingly, games are judged more like films, where the opening
weekend determines how successful a movie is. The shelf-life of games in
a store is too short, and there have been numerous articles written
about shady dealings in game retailers to secure the best shelf space.
As Hart says, "On the Internet, shelf space is unlimited." This means
that not only could catalog titles form a major portion of Yahoo!s
service, but they could also get into independent games and smaller
publishers. Some of these smaller, independent companies, like Strategy
First and Shrapnel Games, deserve more recognition than they currently
receive, but it is hard for gamers to find the great titles they
produce. Although there are no games from these two publishers on the
Games On Demand service now, publishers like these two are definitely in
the sights of Yahoo!.
So just what is available for download? Yahoo! has signed on four of
the biggest games publishers in the industry: Activision, Infogrames,
Take Two, and Eidos. Together, these companies have given Yahoo! access
to 40 titles, mostly older titles that stand out of a crowd. The
highlights are certainly games like Deus Ex, Hitman: Codename 47,
Civilization III, and Serious Sam, but there are plenty more. The
complete list of current offerings is impressive:
ACTION
1. Beach Head 2000
2. Heavy Metal FAKK 2
3. Thief
4. Thief II: The Metal Age
5. Star Trek Away Team
6. Star Trek Voyager Elite Force
7. Hitman: Codename 47
8. MechWarrior 3
9. Serious Sam
10. Rune Gold
11. Grand Theft Auto 2
ADVENTURE
12. Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare
13. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2
14. Nocturne
15. Project Eden
16. Tomb Raider Chronicles
ARCADE / FAMILY
17. Addiction Pinball
18. Operation
19. Pong
20. Monopoly
21. Centipede
22. Missile Command |
RPG
23. Deus Ex
SIMULATION
24. 4X4 EVO
25. Fast Food Tycoon 2
26. Gunship!
27. Monopoly Casio Vegas Edition
28. Super Car Street Challenge
SPORTS
29. Backyard Basketball
30. Golf Resort Tycoon 2
31. Skateboard Park Tycoon
32. Boarder Zone
33. Ski Resort Tycoon 2
STRATEGY
34. Age of Wonders
35. Call to Power 2
36. Civilization III
37. Dark Reign 2
38. Majesty
39. Monopoly Tycoon
40. Star Trek Armada 2 |
While
there is a prevailing attitude of "newer is better" among gamers, it is
impossible to play all of the good games right when they come out. For
experienced gamers, titles like these can fill the holes left in an
otherwise complete gaming record. However, Yahoo! is only partially
focused on the "hardcore" gamer right now. Hart says Yahoo! hopes to
"expand the PC games market by attracting a lot of new people and create
new gamers." One of the reason there are so many "casual" console gamers
is that once you buy the console you really need not invest in any
titles. You can always go rent your favorite game, play through a few
levels, return it after the weekend, and rent it a month down the road.
Or if youre interested in a game, you can at least rent it to check it
out and then decide if a purchase is in order. Aside from downloadable
demos, which never quite represent what a game is really like,
there is no equivalent in PC gaming, and folks who arent so into games
that they read sites like GF! every day probably arent going to mess
with a demo anyway. Yahoo! has targeted this audience in a couple of
ways.
First,
the whole procedure for renting a game is very easy and runs smooth like
butter. You pay your rental fee, download the Exent EXEtender client
directly from Yahoo!, and then choose the game you want to rent. For
each title you rent, you must download a pre-cache. These are the
initial files you need to play the game, and the filesize ranges from
75MB to 200MB. You never actually store the executable files or all of
the game files on your hard drive. Yahoo!s goal is to make the
pre-cache download time equivalent to the time it takes to install a
game from disc, which is pretty accurate for the smaller pre-cache
files. The larger files take closer to 15-20 minutes depending on your
specific broadband connection. Still, this pre-cache is only downloaded
once for each title (unless you delete the files from your hard drive),
so it is a one-time delay in your gameplay. Once youre going on a game,
needed files download in the background as you play.
When youve got the pre-cache down, youre ready to play. All
functions available in the retail version of the game are available in
the Yahoo! rental. Play online multiplayer, host multiplayer matches,
use the in-game editors whatever you can do in the "real" version, you
can do here. Whats more, if you get two levels into Deus Ex on your
first weekend, put it down, then pick it up a month later, you can begin
where you left off. All of your save data remains intact on your hard
drive, even between rentals. Of course, at any time you can delete game
files to free up space on your drive, and that removes the possibility
of continuing from a saved game.
We got to test the system over the past weekend, and we found very
few problems with it. The biggest concern is system specs, which are
outlined for each game online. PC games are tricky, and the difficulty
of getting a PC game to work is another reason why there are not more
hardcore PC gamers. Fortunately, the games that are offered currently
are not the most hardware-intensive titles, so most PC owners who have
bought a computer in the last 1-2 years should be fine on specs. The
fact that the game is stored in a strange spot on your hard drive
precludes your ability to install patches and whatnot (and its assumed
that Yahoo! distributes the most current version of a game, patches and
all), so updating your drivers is about the only thing you can do as a
user to get a game going. Yahoo! does give you access to a technical
Readme.txt file to help you troubleshoot. We had a couple of problems
trying different games on an older PC, but these were troubles I would
expect to have installing the game from a disc, too.
The positive aspects of the program far outweigh the negative. You
can download games to your PC at home, school, or work, giving you
access to a library of titles at a reasonable price. If you only play
games once a month when your college buddies virtually get together,
then this is a perfect solution for you. Try a game before you buy it,
and if you buy it through Yahoo!s partnership with GameStop, youll
receive a 10% discount on the title. That means you can recoup your
rental fee on most titles you purchase, making this an even better deal.
Convenient and robust, the Yahoo! Games On Demand system works like a
charm.
Those of you who have played all the games you want from this list,
have no fears. Yahoo! is in the process of securing the second wave of
titles for the Games On Demand service. They plan to add 3 to 5 titles
each month, and hope to get into pre-release rentals and other services
that cater more to the cutting edge gamers. The most hardcore of gamers
should love the idea of renting a full version of a game a week before
its release.
So far everything is running smoothly at Yahoo! Games On Demand. Our
weekend of gameplay took us through some classic titles that havent
been booted on GF! computers for a long time. Each game played exactly
as the original, disc-based version. If you are a PC owner with
broadband access,
http://gamesondemand.yahoo.com should be on your list of links. This
is the future of PC game rentals, and the future is bright.
Shawn Rider |
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