The Trouble with Torrents
Piracy. Lots of game developers suffer from it. Some people think it’s killing the industry, driving games to closed platforms. Obviously I don’t agree (at least not completely), starting a game studio and all that. But it’s worth paying attention to. I did a search on WPP and Torrent. Found a nice page that listed five different sites where you could download War Plan Pacific. I hope you, dear reader, didn’t download any of those.
Because who knows what they contain.
Or put it another way, don’t put that zip file in your computer, you don’t know where it’s been.
The smallest of the five torrent downloads was 416 Meg. One was over 900 Mb. The bits that ship on the retail disk from Shrapnel? 110Mb . Throw in a pdf of the manual for another 8 Mb to make it 118 Mb. Throw in the 1.0.1 patch and it’s still under 150 mb. So if you sample one of those torrent copies, you’re getting between 266 and 760 Megabytes of, ahem, extra stuff. Wonder what that extra stuff does?
Because who knows what they contain.
Or put it another way, don’t put that zip file in your computer, you don’t know where it’s been.
The smallest of the five torrent downloads was 416 Meg. One was over 900 Mb. The bits that ship on the retail disk from Shrapnel? 110Mb . Throw in a pdf of the manual for another 8 Mb to make it 118 Mb. Throw in the 1.0.1 patch and it’s still under 150 mb. So if you sample one of those torrent copies, you’re getting between 266 and 760 Megabytes of, ahem, extra stuff. Wonder what that extra stuff does?
posted by JohnH at
9:08 PM
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