Sometime in late September the Triton Distribution service, aka Steam Lite (I should copyright that term) aka Steam Wannabe etc, suddenly stopped working for its users. Now for those of you who don't know, without a functioning service, the people who bought Prey through Triton, well now they had a game that was non-functioning itself. Many people freaked out, complained and the usual bashing took place. Not that I blame them of course.
OBWANDO from Triton and Joe Siegler from 3D Realms posted a couple updates the other day on the situation, stating that 3D Realms was looking into alternatives for Triton users. People figured they'd be given a patch to unlock the game, or a patch to remove the authorization over Triton. Well, that 2K Games and 3D Realms aren't going to be doing either of those. In fact, Triton users will be getting free boxed copies of the game sent to them. Now that's some customer service. Here is the story from Mr. Siegler himself:
As those of you who purchased Prey through Triton are by now aware, the service is no longer functioning. This is an unfortunate happening,but we do have some good news for all of those who bought Prey through the Triton service.
2K has set up a replacement program for customers who purchased Prey via the Triton download service. A new boxed copy of Prey will be shipped to each customer who purchased the game via Triton, DiStream or www.playtriton.com, as Triton is undergoing a reorganization process and copies downloaded from the service may not function properly. There is no action required on the part of the purchaser. Boxed copies will be mailed automatically to the credit card address on file. Thank you for your patience during this interim period; we look forward to getting affected customers back up and playing Prey as soon as possible.
So there you have it, 2K Games comes through as does 3D Realms. Triton which was trying to compete with Steam (yeah, right) failed miserably apparently, and now Triton users get boxed copies of Prey to compensate for the situation. Pretty neat of 2K Games don't you think?
View: 3D Realms Triton Update View: Prey/Triton Discussion @ 3D Realms Forums
Of course it probably the only way to give you the freedom to install the games anywhere you want on as many systems as you want because you can only play it on one system at a time anyway.
But that's also where things go wrong. If I buy 2 boxed games I can install one on computer A and one on computer B and play them simultaneously (well not me personally, but my kid brother could be playing the other game or a friend). But with Steam this is impossible! It's something I've never understood, I played for each and every one of those games, why can't my entire family enjoy them at the same time (mind you, I'm talking about _different_ games here).
And I've had the same problem as you did where I had moved and had to wait for 2 months before I finally got my ADSL connection. 2 months in which it was completely impossible to play the single player Steam games.
Why o why do they have games that I like so very much that you can't play without Steam, at least that way I could just ignore them by buying the boxed version :-/
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