Direct 2 Drive

Wossi

Wossi

Wossi

Soldato
Joined
27 Oct 2003
Posts
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Location
East Mids.
http://www.direct2drive.com/

After seeing numerous adverts for this I decided to check it out. According to them you pay for the game and it's your's to do what you want with it. You can re-download it as many times as you need once you have paid for it, which is kind of cool, and you can save it to a dvd/cd, again kind of cool. The one major problem is patches and expansions. You have to use patches / expansions supplied by them, no other ones will work.

I can see this being a reasonably good idea but I'm not sure on the whole having to use their patches. On the other hand the prices are in $ so it would probably work out cheaper than buying in shops.

Has anyone used this before or does it look like too much hassle?


Dons, if this a bit shady apologies, but from the looks of it they are owned by ign/Gamespy so I'm pretty sure it's legit.
 
Seems expensive, bearing in mind you cannot resell the game after you're done with it. At those prices I would sooner buy the physical game.
 
you can patch with normal patches if you get someone to send you thier .exe of the game.

(i have only got 2 games from it though, so maybe im wrong!)
 
Myself and quite a number of others on here got Oblivion from D2D because we managed to get it before it was released here in the shops. :)
The download speeds were good, 4.15gig in just over 5hrs which was mostly maxing out my 2mb line.
I can't comment on mods for all the games but for Oblivion the D2D installation is different to a standard installation.
Some normal mods will work with the game, I have already added a couple.
But I can't install normal mods that add textures and sounds to the game as that part of the install is different. :(

It was a good system to use to get the game early but it was no cheaper and I do not have the physical manual or map. So it depends on what you are after, I doubt I'll be using D2D often.
 
As mentioned it's too expensive really and the only reason I can see many people using it is to (as the above poster did) get the game before it is available in the UK (USA typically sees games released at least 3 days earlier). Presumably there is no copy protection in the sense of needing a disk in the drive all the time, which might appeal also.

If they knocked down the price to a reasonable level I might consider it, but I'd rather stick to getting proper retail copies myself.

For multiplayer games in particular I would steer well clear given that you will often need to install the latest patch to maintain compatibility with servers.
 
i believe a fair few members bought Oblivion off Direct 2 Drive when the game was released... it came out a couple of days early in the states compared to the UK and you could still download it if you were in the UK.

i think GordyR was one of the main Direct 2 Drive pimpers in the Oblivion threads. :p
 
Most of the new releases seem to be retailing at $49.95 - that's £29!

I'd rather just buy the game online for about £25 or buy it from a shop for £30-£35 - it's not cheap enough really

I thought it would be a fair bit cheaper as I was hoping that the costs saved with distribution, manual printing etc would be passed on but it looks like they aren't
 
I think the problem is that D2D (GSI, IGN or whoever it is) needs to take their cut as well, and of course cover (international) traffic costs so what you gain in one area is lost in another.

The bottomline is, you still have a middleman. Contrast this with a model whereby the developer distributes the games themself, e.g. STEAM. There is more scope for savings there because there is no publisher, either in the form of your traditional retail product nor a third party distributing the games via download.
 
Its very handy for Ubisoft games as you do not get the insert DVD hassle as the Starforce protection is taken of care of with your downloaded files.
 
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