Play-before-you-download service launches

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 17 Mar 2009 at 14:30

A new videogame download service will allow customers to begin playing games before they've finished downloading them.

Digital download services such as Steam and Direct2Drive have transformed the PC games market, but have also left a number of users out in the cold, as the entire game must be downloaded before they can begin playing.

The huge file sizes of most modern games - even demos are routinely over 1GB - make downloading them a prohibitively time-consuming exercise for people on slower connections.

British company Awomo intends to change this. Its service downloads the game in usable chunks, so that gamers can begin playing the first level, while the later levels download in the background.

The first game being offered is Tomb Raider Legend which weighs in at a hefty 7.2GB download. Using Awomo, however, customers will only need to download 652MB worth of files before they can start playing.

"This is a super-fast way of distributing games. For the first time we have created a system that really does for games what iTunes does for music," Awomo chief executive Roger Walkden tells the BBC.

Clearly, the system has it limits. Open-ended games such as Fallout 3 won't work, simply because the game can't be split into chunks.

The company has yet to release a full title list, or indeed pricing details. It claims titles will be "similarly priced" to other download services.

Awomo will be hoping to replicate the success of Steam which pioneered the digital download model. It currently offers around 600 games and has 20 million subscribers.