Going Medieval

I was in the USA, in an EB Games store, on the day Medieval II Total War came out. But some bloke at the warehouse had forgotten to load the box on the truck, and so I didn't get the game there. And I didn't get another opportunity to buy the game in the US, there being no shops selling PC games on any of the airports I passed through.

Back home I found an e-mail from Fileplanet in my mailbox, offering Medieval II as downloadable full version from their Direct2Drive store. $49.95, the same price as the boxed version would have cost. Hmmm, should I buy that? To make that decision I first downloaded and played the demo, liked the demo, and thus decided to buy the game. Headed to Fileplanet, went through the usual steps of buying things online, and hit a wall: Medieval II is only sold to people in the USA, Canada, and Mexico. Doh! Why that? The game has been released in Europe already, why shouldn't the downloadable version be available for Europe?

So I ended up buying Medieval II in the boxed version from Amazon UK. Pretty much the same price, except for the added cost of shipping. Ordered the game on the weekend, received it yesterday. Only got around to install it and play the tutorial, I'll play it more over the coming days and will post a review in a week or two.

But the story got me to think about the difference between buying a game as download and buying it on a CD/DVD in a box. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages.

The big advantage of downloading a game is that it makes impulse buying possible. You decide to buy and do it immediately. If you have a decent broadband connection, you'll have the game up and running within hours. The disadvantage is that you don't get the game in any physical form. If you don't do a backup of the game and/or the email with the download link and registration key, and your hard drive crashes, you lose your purchase. But if you know that, and you are a careful person, you can easily make a backup of the games you downloaded to a DVD.

Of course you could still get into trouble, depending on the copy protection scheme the game uses. People who bought the shooter Prey from a download service named Triton recently found that they couldn't play the game any more. The service had gone bust, their servers were down, and the game only runs after verifying with the server that it is a legit copy. No server, no game. Fortunately the game's distributor 2K Games are offering a replacement, shipping boxed copies of the game to the people affected. Nevertheless that provided a pointed reminder of the dangers of buying game downloads.

If you buy a boxed copy of a game, you have the game in a physical form, and unless you scratch the disc or your dog chews it, you'll be able to reinstall it if ever your hard drive crashes. You also get the game's manual in physical form instead of just a .pdf file.

The downside is that you'll either have to drive to a shop to buy the game, or wait a few days for a mail-ordered copy to arrive. And then again you can have problems with the copy protection. In the worst case the game decides not to run on your machine, due to some incompatibility of the copy protection scheme with your computer. Or the game installs a copy protection program like Starforce on your PC, which ends up making your computer slower or instable. But the most common copy protection is the game forcing you to insert the disc every time you want to play it.

Now I've been around long enough to remember computers without hard drives. Whatever software you wanted to run, you first needed to insert the disc, a floppy at that time. Most software has advanced far from this stage, nobody needs to insert an Office disc into a drive to start Word or Excel. Only games are still backwards like that, forcing you to keep your collection of discs close to the computer, and start searching for the right disc whenever you want to play another game. The one advantage of MMORPG is that they don't need that sort of copy protection. And while swapping discs on a desktop PC is just annoying, it gets worse if you want to play on a laptop. Your laptop's hard drive might have enough room to have dozens of games installed. But do you really want to lug all those game discs with you?

I am one of the most "legit" people I know when it comes to copyright, I don't pirate "warez" games, nor music or films. I buy the games I want to play. But sometimes you can find me surfing on evil hacker sites, just to download a no-CD crack, which enables me to play the games I legally bought without having to insert the disc every time. Stupid. I really think the game companies should come up with something else, like an online registration of the game, which verifies that you are the legal owner of the game, and then modifies the files on your hard drive to run only on that particular PC, but without a disc in the drive.

So in the end I prefer the downloadable version of a game to the boxed version. I can live without the printed manual, I can make a physical backup copy of the game, and then the advantage of not needing a disc makes the downloadable version more attractive to me. Now I just need to find a store that sells downloadable games to Europeans.