[ruok0101]

I think this overlooks all the pluses of this new "medium". How did you get your copy of wolfenstein in 1992? Travel to the radioshack, get a stack of disks, feed them one by one into your trs80? Within seconds this morning I was playing this game - with a 1000 other people simultaneously. Amazing in my book.

[teamonkey]

It's not competing with 1992 distribution though, it's competing with 2013 distribution.

[ruok0101]

I just bought my son a digital edition of Diablo 3 the other day. It was far from smooth sailing.

[Buttons840]

You had a problem with it? I haven't tried Diablo 3 specifically, but I find in most modern distribution platforms like Steam (or similar utilities from Blizzard) you just buy, click, walk away for 2 hours, and when you come back the game is installed and ready to play. It couldn't be easier to install native apps! -- when every thing works correctly.

[perbu]

One particular thing I noticed about Diablo is that it was playable long before it actually finished downloading. Most of the maps, video and artwork was downloaded as I played the first few levels. Pretty cool.

[brokenparser]

But is Diablo 3 played in a browser? Thought so.

[stan_rogers]

In exactly what way is this question a follow-on from the parent comment? The statement was, to paraphrase: "Purchasing and installing native applications can still suck, even with '2013 distribution'." IOW, all that's been saved in 20-odd years is the drive to the retail store, the drudgery of swapping floppies and (usually) the task of manually configuring a memory manager. We're far from an instant-on, pay-and-play world for native apps (and in some cases you still need to be connected to get moment-by-moment permission to run the app you "purchased"—the internet as dongle).

[jff]

I could also be playing Wolfenstein or one of many, many games in about a minute via Steam.

[jiggy2011]

Wolf3D was shareware, so the preferred method was simply to make copies of the floppy and distribute them to all of your friends. I remember having more games than I could play in ~1993.

[guelo]

I don't remember how I got it but I'm sure I didn't go to a store. It really wasn't that hard to get either through BBSs or copying from a friend. It went viral and everyone had a copy. BTW, by 1992 PC clones had won, trs80s were long gone.