Author Topic: Distribution concerns at 400+ mb?  (Read 2290 times)

Offline CautiousChaos

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Distribution concerns at 400+ mb?
« on: July 15, 2010, 07:36:55 pm »
Hey there x4000 - I am in the process of downloading v1.0 and will shortly be purchasing the key ($10?! - I'd buy your games for much more than that.  Heck, if you offered a bag of broken weasels, I'd buy them just based on your attention to detail, quality, and the great interaction you've had on these boards).

Where was I...  Oh, yes.  So the download is 420+mb, which is huge.  You can plainly see that there's a lot of content there.  But do you think the size of the download will be an impediment to some of the third party game channels that you may be working with? 

When you look at other titles in the "puzzle" genre the magic size seems to be less than 100mb.  At 4x that size, do you think you'll have adoption issues by a) the portals and/or b) the consumer who may balk at bandwidth and download times?

Interested in hearing what you think, after you get past all of the pre-launch/launch activities.  No rush...

-cc

Offline Dragon

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Re: Distribution concerns at 400+ mb?
« Reply #1 on: July 15, 2010, 09:35:30 pm »
I suppose that depends on how large the upload bandwidth is.  Most people these days (that play online games at least) have broadband, and 400mb doesn't take that long on a 3megabit connection.  18ish minutes.  And that's at the low end of most consumers bandwidth.  I could download it in 4 minutes, and I live in a small town.  Someone living in some place like San Francisco or New York would be able to download it even faster and easier.

Most other places in the world actually have better, faster, cheaper, and more broadband then the United States.  That being said, there are still some people out there that do use dial up.  I know someone that plays EVE Online using dial up.  For people like that, 100MB or 420MB doesn't change a whole lot, it's going to take a huge amount of time either way.

On the other hand though.....  If the upload bandwidth of where you are downloading it from is rather low, then it could take quite a while, and that would be a problem.  If people really think it's a problem, it might be possible to do something similar to how WoW distributes patches, via direct download with the speed boosted by bitTorrent.  They have the whole thing integrated into the game, using the same port as the game and so forth.  I know this from the one time I tried the trial, as I had to patch before I could find myself bored and quitting.... ;)

Offline x4000

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Re: Distribution concerns at 400+ mb?
« Reply #2 on: July 15, 2010, 10:24:04 pm »
Not particularly worried about it; otherwise we wouldn't have done such a large filesize.  This game has premium quality art and music, unlike what you tend to encounter in a puzzle game, hence the larger size.  Five years ago this would have been a huge limiting factor, but nowadays I'm not too worried.
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