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Microsoft and MekTek find legal, compelling use of BitTorrent: distributing MechWarrior 4!
MekTek's solution is simple: create a version of the game that bypasses their distribution system that can be freely proliferated using BitTorrent. Why other developers and publishers haven't yet jumped on the peer-to-peer gravy train is beyond me.
If you haven't heard of the MechWarrior franchise, give the latest game a go -- in a few days anyway, when the BitTorrent release is ready!
Comments
10
Subscribe to commentsbug frawgMay 5th 2010 12:28PM
"The masters of all things peer-to-peer, Torrent Freak, is reporting on a great example of BitTorrent being used for the forces of Good:"
Depending on who you ask illegal file sharing is already a force of good, or at least a force of neutral. :P
Mattd00dMay 5th 2010 12:47PM
Pretty sure Blizzard uses P2P and has for a while
Sebastian AnthonyMay 5th 2010 1:05PM
My original story had 'Blizzard and EA' in it, but removed because if I'm going to name specifics... I'd like to get them all :)
AemonyMay 5th 2010 1:01PM
MekTek's client already had BitTorrent support in it. When you wanted to download you could either choose HTTP or BitTorrent. As the maniac I am I chose BitTorrent and then extracted the torrent file and downloaded the game using my regular BitTorrent client. As I did with the StarCraft 2 beta and every WoW patch.
Sebastian AnthonyMay 5th 2010 1:05PM
Ah-hah! Maybe this is more about them removing the need to hit the central server at all then -- maybe it was used for authorization or something...
Jason LitkaMay 5th 2010 1:35PM
Too bad MTX (the crappy client MekTek insists on using) is such a complete pile. Between locking up for 5 minutes at a time, telling you there are no games to download, and just flat out refusing to work on some machines, you're better off just waiting a week or two for them to release a stand-alone EXE version.
The good news is, if you're one of the people that can get MTX to work (I got it going on a notebook), once you've downloaded the game and patches, you can run it anywhere by just copying the game folder to another computer. No install is actually needed.
F-ZeroMay 5th 2010 9:09PM
Well, CoH uses p2p to push out its patches
chief1983May 29th 2010 2:24PM
The torrent file itself was hosted on their server, which went down from the strain. The MTX client was also hosted there. The same servers also hosted the direct HTTP pull I believe, so you can see how much was going through one system at the launch time. Luckily people started posting the torrents they were able to copy from the MTX client's temp folder for others to get and download so the torrent managed to stay up throughout the whole ordeal, it just became hard to get for a while. I believe that the MTX client is a good idea, but I'm surprised they weren't able to work out more of these bugs given the huge delays in getting MW4 approved for free release.
Sebastian AnthonyMay 30th 2010 7:35AM
Thanks for the info :)
chief1983May 29th 2010 2:27PM
Almost forgot, Microsoft had virtually nothing to do with this. All they did was take a year to finally OK the release.