News AWOMO starts accepting Beta testers

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/06/01/awomo_starts_accepting_beta_testers/1

GDI opens regisitration for the Beta phase of AWOMO, its new digital delivery system for games.

 

I'd like to hear the logic behind that.

 

Digital delivery has it's flaws...remember when steam went down for a couple of days? I couldn't even play CS 1.6...

(before ANY of you mention offline mode, i'm not in the habit of keeping passwords saved)

 

They really need to get Command and Conquer up for download

 

Branson seems to have his finger in everything.
I can't begin to list all the stuff he does or is planning.

H.B.

 

i really hope they make the games playable while off-line...... and without having to save the password.

 

personally, despite its few flaws - steam is a pretty good system

Hopefully after that incident, they have updated their disaster plan, and hopefully have more login servers across the globe

But now steam is getting much bigger, with a lot more games being added their user base increasing should give them more money to play with, to get a nice rock solid system

the main thing that bothers me is, i don't want 80 different content distribution systems, if i'm gonna leave a program running eating resources, i only want 1, so would these people make 1 good system or go with a popular one (like steam) instead of everything trying to make their own half baked solutions

 

pretty simple....

you pay X dollars a month, and have access to all the latest and greatest games..

if you are paying $5 a month that means you spent $60 for the year... assuming you would buy more than 1 of the games they have to offer, you are making out pretty good.

 

ahhh and i want a price cut.... because they come without package and manual.

 

They couldn't really do much about it... I live 30 miles from Bellevue, and it was a really bad windstorm that shut down the servers. The power was lost all over the place for about two days, including where I lived and where the Steam servers were. I don't see what else they could do. Sorry but I'm just frustrated when people go on about this like as if someone could just flip a switch. If they lived here, they'd say otherwise.

 

they couldn't have done much about those servers

however, they should have multiple redundancy's, they should have servers spread across the globe, just because there was a storm where u were (and this probably sounds quite heartless considering people lost their lives and a lot of damage occurred, but its not supposed to come across that way) but there is no reason why valve should keep all their servers in 1 location
People were angry because if you setup your servers in a place prone to very bad storms, you should have redundancy
And due to this short sightedness, no-one on the planet could play any steam games

 

Well, simply because a storm like that is pretty rare and not usual. I'm sure they've thought about having servers across the globe, but Valve is a small company and I don't think they are capable of that just yet.

 

Valve isn't exactly a small company. 13 million Steam users agree with me on that one.

I'm not sure about multiple redundancy plans, but I reckon two locations is easily within their reach, even if they just put a server in another office out of town. From their point of view, it's less of a commitment to customers and more to do with their commitment to other publishers and profit.

Overall Steam is pretty damn good though and their performance has been damn good.

 

Well that is now, that steam outage happened, what, 6 months ago at least, steam has recently received a nice boost in games and so on, i recon at the time they may have only had 6 million or something (as an out of my a** figure)

Definitely true, although it will require some work to start using multiple locations, they should at least have the login server in multiple (OK so if the main location goes down people cant buy stuff, but they can at least play stuff)
But after you start having 2 locations, 3 or 4 is much less work then adding the second

Definitely - i was downloading off steam the other day and getting ~180kb/s - which is nothing to complain about at all

 

"Only" 6 Million Users.

ROFL, Only? You know what it takes to get that many people to register, well actually, maybe you don't, lol.

 

It wouldn't take much for a redundancy server or two. I recognise that you can't flip a switch to make everything right again, but making the amount of money Valve make, it shouldn't be a problem, even for one set of redundant servers

 

The main thing is you're all talking of them having 'a' redundancy server. It takes way more than just one server for bit-tech to run from what I know and we only get a million pageviews a month. Valve would have to have around 15-30 redundancy servers in each location, just like they do at their primary location

 

Remember redundancy isnt cheap and the cost will have to be offset somewhere.. Which means us as consumers..

 

well that's true in a way

however, lets say that valve currently have 30 servers for login in 1 place

Now, lets say they setup 4 locations, each with 10 servers, so now in total that have 40 servers, instead of the 30 they need
If 1 location goes down, then performance is still fine, but now if 1 location goes down, everyone is still able to use steam

So instead of just having plain redundancy, they can have load balancing redundancy
This really shouldn't be beyond valve, and it shouldn't cost them a lot more, its also a much smarter way of doing business, id be surprised if all of bit-techs servers were in 1 central location, but even then, if you servers go down, for an entire month, that's a million people who cant see a site
If steam has 12 million customers, and they go down for 4 days, that's potentially 12 million pissed off users

 

Except if those four locations are in constant use then the risk of them failing increases. The best way to have a redundancy is to never use it, not to use a little bit of it constantly.