by Jeff Woleslagle on Jul 25, 2008
More bang for your bits...
BitRaider promises to get players into the game with only a fraction of the download and save publishers a ton of cash in bandwidth costs, but how does it work? Is performance impacted as game assets stream seamlessly into your computer as you play? For these answers and more, we recently spoke with BitRaider's Jay Moore at China Joy 2008.
"BitRaider, in a nutshell, uses your spare bandwidth to download parts of the game you're not playing as you go, and allows you to start playing with a fraction of the game downloaded. 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."