Mechwarrior 4 was released this week for free by MekTek in an effort to revive the series. After the game was released there were over 100,000 people that tried to download the game which caused the distribution system used by MekTek to crash. MekTek uses a distribution system they created called MTX.
"MTX was developed out the need for a centralized distribution and patching point for all of MekTek's software currently being developed. The MTX software has been in development by our studio since the announcement of the FREE MechWarror release and has now successfully reached public beta status. MTX is a free desktop application which will connect you with the MekTek.net community as well BattleTech.com and the rest of our partners."
According to TorrentFreak, MekTek's solution to the problem is to distribute the software using BitTorrent and spread the load and bandwidth across all the users to get the game out as quickly as possible.
"Once this new version clears our beta team, it will be made available for download in your BitTorrent client of choice. Please be patient as this may take a few days.
We will continue to work on ironing out the bugs in MTX, until then, we will provide an alternate way to acquire the game and updates through the self installing executables."
As more and more games are distributed online it makes sense to take advantage of BitTorrents distribution advantages. It minimizes the bandwidth that is needed on the distributors end and it spreads the load across all the peers.
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