3D Realms Use BitTorrent to Promote Duke Nukem Forever
The PC game ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ has been in production for 10 years so one way or another, it must’ve cost the developers a small fortune. However, as 3D Realms have decided to release their latest teaser on BitTorrent, distribution of their advertising content by this method will be reduced to zero. Groovy.
It’s been in development for a decade already and won Wired’s Vaporware Lifetime Achievement Award. Undeterred, 3D Realms have just completed a new teaser to tempt the gaming masses. Quite whether further teasing is required after a 10 year wait is seriously up for debate, but tease they did.
Joe Siegler from 3D Realms said: “As promised yesterday (actually an hour earlier than promised), we are proud to finally bring you an all new teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever.” He continued: “We will try and update our list of downloadable links when we can, but with our server so swamped it might be difficult.”
Bandwidth woes. That’s gotta hurt.
3D Realms has offered a long list of places to download the teaser, but clearly with a keen eye on bandwidth costs, right at the top is ‘BitTorrent Download’. Using BitTorrent will allow them to distribute the promotional material for nothing, direct to their target audience of PC-owning, tech-savvy gamers, with a scalability to tackle even the most ridiculously hyped product at just a moment’s notice. And if it all goes horribly wrong, there’s no financial cost to the distributor as it didn’t cost anything in the first place – an ideal position for a company advertising a product for 10 years and getting no sales, for example.
3D Realms (and dozens of companies before them, this is nothing new) used Mininova to host the torrent and a combination of The Pirate Bay, SumoTracker, Denis Stalker and torrent.downloads.to to track the peers. All of these sites will have given their services for free too. I don’t expect any other organization involved with 3D Realms and the development of this semi-mythical game are ever this generous, so I guess it’s three cheers for those public trackers mentioned above.
Those who prefer to view their video through a small grainy box while running up bandwidth costs (and ad revenue) for YouTube, can go here, while BitTorrent users can get their video in all its intended HD glory from mininova.
Ahhh! That’s better!
