Despite the two-year-old Games for Windows marketing initiative, we’ve seen a collective nose-thumbing by many brick-and-mortar games retailers. Vastly decreased inventories, pre-order only availability, and delayed street dates at many local resellers has increasingly made digital distribution of PC games a preferred purchase method for many gamers. Unlike retail, however, digital distribution is evolving in ways that benefit both the game developer and consumer.

Enter BitRaider, a distribution technology that promises to get gamers past increasingly bulky downloads and lengthy installs, and into the game substantially faster (and without a loss of performance in-game) while simultaneously saving developers and publishers bandwidth costs for content an individual gamer won’t play. A case in point, in testing with a recently released top-tier MMORPG, only 3% of the 13.5 gig download package was needed to jump into the game and begin playing.

“And that’s with the rather large cinematics,” explained one of the leading forces behind BitRaider, Jay Moore. Jay took some time to explain to the BitRaider concept to me in a taxi weaving through Shanghai rush-hour traffic at China Joy ’08. “You can begin playing without any slowdown to the play experience. We really clamped down to make sure that the CPU and the overall game experience is not degradated by [BitRaider], which is really different from any of the other competing packages out there... It really is a bit of magic on the side of making sure our asset table is so well architected that, even in streaming patches down the road, if we haven’t delivered a bit and it’s still not needed, you won’t have to deliver it until the player needs it... And [in the case of large patches] we’re not redundantly delivering those bits.”

BitRaider, in a nutshell, uses your spare bandwidth to download parts of the game you’re not playing as you go. Given enough time, you’ll grab the whole game, but - and this gets into the dark side of digital distribution - if you abandon the game after the first few times you play, the publisher saves the bandwidth costs of delivering you parts of the game you’ve never played (it’s about $0.60 per gigabyte in the United States - magnify that several times over hundreds of thousands of gamers and you’re talking serious money). This savings is considerable for all games and gamers, but is especially worthwhile for things like free trials and focused beta testing.

Speaking of all games and gamers, estimates indicate that in the MMORPG industry’s golden child, World of Warcraft, the average player doesn’t actually play about two-thirds of the game’s content. And the gap is only widening as updates and expansions deliver players to high level content faster and faster.

But what happens when a player does something unexpected, e.g. a high level player decides to run a friend through a much lower-level dungeon? “There’s enough stub-out that, in any direction you’re gonna go, we’re going to take you there and bring that data in as its needed. We’ve tried to fail that scenario, but even when we change the movement rate of the character so that we’re moving as fast as the game can possibly render, we haven’t been able to get past the download rate of the content. That’s on a tamped-down one megabit pipe. We’ve really stress tested around that to make sure that we won’t have a wait-state. We know it’s possible, and we’ve seen it where the pipe isn’t available, but that’s on a 56k modem where there’s just enough bandwidth to talk to the server.” And, with all apologies to 1996, gamers playing on a 56k line probably ought to buy the box anyway.

But now, in 2008, if bandwidth is increasingly becoming cheaper and faster, why bother with such a technology? According to BigWorld Technology Business Development VP Gavin Longhurst, until bandwidth is virtually free, the Internet is faster than any hard drive we have today, and we’re all streaming Crysis III like we teenagers are presently streaming RuneScape, technologies like BitRaider will have a major place in digital distribution. “It’s a scaling business model... no matter which way you cut it, it will still be cheaper to use a system like this.” And, again, the benefit extends to gamers. “For the psychology of the game-player, that initial engagement is hugely important. If they get pissed off because they’re watching this download bubble, you end up churning a large amount of people, especially for kids and junior-based content. You’re playing the same game, just playing it faster and the publisher is saving money.”

Jay added that, because of the psychological effect of decreased waiting time, “What we’ve found, especially with our triple-A titles, is that players get a better experience right out of the box.”

And, in an industry where money outlays increase drastically over the course of the production timeline, Jay explained publishers can implement BitRaider using one of two incredibly fast methods. The “Profiler” can sift through the game’s assets and put together a reasonable estimate of what parts of the asset table should be provisioned when. In the case that the resource structures are available and / or the game uses a BitRaider-recognized engine (like BigWorld, Quake3 or Quake4, and many more), the previously configured “Recognizer” will begin dissecting the asset packs and building up the asset tables from there so that there’s absolutely no guesswork involved. With this relatively simple and quickly implemented workflow, the first entirely playable chunk of the game becomes less than 8% of the total download.

In short, technologies like BitRaider are a win-win solution for gamers and the games industry. With many aspects of our workaday routine and leisure increasingly stored online - email, photos, and journals to name three - why shouldn’t our more hardcore games be seamlessly downloaded on an as-needed basis as well? It’s just the start of the next phase in digital distribution, and we thank BitRaider’s Jay Moore and BigWorld’s Gavin Longhurst for clueing us in.