Adaptive Game Bundles: Sapphire Select

Final Words

As we have said, our biggest complaint was the time that it took to install the games (especially in the current state with no status indicator). Though there is not much that can be done about the time that it takes, work is still being done on the UI.

The final game list that we have for now is as follows:

Brothers In Arms
The Chronicles of Riddick
Prince Of Persia Warrior Within
Tony Hawk Underground 2
Swat 4
Silent Hunter III
Ground Control II
Tribes Vengeance
Robots
Richard Burns Rally
Evil Genius

As time goes on, older titles will be replaced with newer ones, but this is what we should see in the first few boxes.

We feel that only an hour of play may be a bit on the short side, but it is enough to give the user a taste of what the game will be like. As this technology is tacked onto a game rather than built into it, we won't be seeing features that allow the completion of an objective as the end of the trial as was the case with shareware.

One of the issues that Sapphire talked about was the use of mods or patches with Trymedia's ActiveMARK (the software that makes this all possible). Sapphire has said that all the developers of all the games that they will include have signed on to support them with ActiveMARK friendly content. Patching the game with a standard update would essentially break the install, but if developers live up to their word, ActiveMARK users should have no issue updating their software at the same time as those who bought retail boxes. In fact, Sapphire has said that their DVDs will include the latest updates at the time of packaging.

Of course, security is of the utmost concern. Sapphire wouldn't be going forward with this unless they thought they had a safe bet in ActiveMARK. The hacker community hasn't hit a stumbling block yet. Generally, when it comes to encoding and protection schemes, the question is not "if..." but "when...". Generally, any type of encryption can be broken: it's just a matter of time. We will be interested to see how the community responds to this technology.

If all goes well for Sapphire, it is very likely that other vendors will quickly adopt Trymedia's solution. We see this (or similar) technology being included in all major graphics card vendors bundles in the not so distant future.

On the plus side, we don't need a CD or DVD in the drive, there's no swapping disks to install anything, users have the ability to choose the games that they like after a free trial period, and Sapphire is offering the rest of the games at a "significant" discount over retail (we aren't sure of the percentage, but Sapphire has said that all titles will be sold at very attractive prices).

The negatives include the time that it takes to install a game, the clunky interface (which should get better), and (currently) a lack of any extraordinarily compelling titles. Sapphire has been talking with Ubisoft, so we could see some interesting additions in the future.

Overall, this is a very useful idea that will continue to get better as it matures.