Absolutely Delicious....

Another day, another stupidly monikered ‘Net’ company. This time round we have the deliciously named ‘Yummy Interactive’ (why, oh why, didn’t they run that by a focus group first???). Now you may be expostulating in the background... Yes, I can hear you now: ‘you fool, Caines! How do you intend to write an entire article about a company who HAVEN’T ACTUALLY DONE ANYTHING YET?’ Well, I would probably have great difficulty if it was not for the stir that Yummy has caused among so-called gaming experts. Contrary to what their name suggests, Yummy have actually raised a serious point (yeah, I found it hard to believe that people could be serious about a company called Yummy!) with regards to the future of the games industry. Namely, as a junkie might (I guess...) say; ‘what type of delivery should you use’?

So, I guess I’ll have to break it down and give it ta ya straight (thank you, Tom Petty). You see, Yummy want to be the Blockbuster Video (oh, what a difference) of gaming. Aiming squarely at those lucky people with broadband connections they are offering online game rental. You pay between $2 and $5 for the right to play a game for 48 hours. Once your time is up (duh duh duh) the downloaded game stays on your computer albeit in a deactivated form (oh, my poor hard drive) until you pay to rent or buy it, or you delete it. Similar to renting a game from the video store, except you do not have to drive back through the rain to return Generic Shooter Three, previously advertised as ‘the Jesus of games’ (I played that one. Was tempted to stick nails through palms). On the other hand, all the games offered by Yummy at the moment are pretty aged, somewhat negating the “rent-before-you-buy” argument.

As you may have detected I am pretty sceptical about this scheme and, as it turns out, so are many of the game companies. Only Eidos Interactive, Infogrames and Activision have committed to the project in any form (oh yeah, and the god awful Ripcord. Save our souls) and may source at Activision is calling the project “shareware plus one” and saying that his company is only involved because “if we get left behind again, EA have won. Full stop”. That for me gets to the crux of the matter: the games companies themselves have no idea how people will want their games in the future. Thus, to try and guide them and you I have compiled a rough guide of how you may be buying games in twenty years time:

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