The Day One Game Delivery Dilemma: Gamers Get Creative to Fight Waiting for Massive Downloads – Top 5 Strategies
There’s an epic battle being waged every day. It’s not a fight against alien invaders. It’s a face-off between gamers who want to enjoy playing directly after purchase and the brutal reality of long download wait times. As games become incredibly large, gamers have devised cunning strategies to fight boredom while waiting. Here are our Top 5 strategies to fight waiting for massive downloads:
1. Time Travel: By purchasing and pre-loading games in advance, gamers bypass the linearity of time, no Delorean required. This sometimes backfires – large day one patches can yank our time travelers into a time loop creating hours of waiting time.
2. Appetizers: While waiting for their main course to its complete download, gamers snack on smaller games, a testament to the power of distraction. Yes, some gamers choose to download and install a smaller game first to fight the boredom of waiting for the big rig to land.
3. The Mad Scientist: Some gamers, unsatisfied with the speed of their connection, have resorted to multiple wired and wireless connections. Using multiple broadband connections, gamers try to warp speed their download.
4. The Return of the Cartridge: You thought game cartridges were only for consoles? With the sheer size of modern games, gamers are now hoarding SD cards so that even if they run low on hard drive space, they don’t need to delete and re-download a complete game to play.
5. Pass out: Yes it’s true. Some gamers report to simply fall asleep while waiting, hypnotized by the slow moving progress bar for download completion. And if they pass out long enough the game may already have downloaded more than 50%.
With ROCKITPLAY FastStart, gamers never need to endure long waiting times for downloads – they just click to play and start playing in minutes or even seconds. FastStart powers near-instant play after downloading only a small portion of the game. Players enjoy playing while the download continues in the background.
In an independent study, goetzpartners found a significant preference for FastStart among gamers, with 91% expressing their satisfaction and their desire to see this technology implemented more broadly, 83% of gamers indicating that FastStart would positively influence their download decisions, and 84% expressing willingness to switch game stores for the same game offered with a FastStart feature.