S&M Episode 4 - steadfastly refuses to download

Sacharissa

Title says it all really - it starts downloading (at 5kbps - yep, that's right folks, 56Kbps speeds - I have a 16Mb connection and I have no problems downloading anything else at (up to) 1.5MB/s. I have four systems (2 ******* boxes, 1 PPC Mac and 1 Intel Mac) and I can download everything else but this with abandon. The error code, if it helps, is ARM1056, 12002. The best downloads speeds are on my MBP (using an excellent download accelerator called Speed Download) where I regularly hit 1.6MB/s+.

Anyway, I digress. I've been attempting to download episode four since I received the email informing me that it'd been unleashed. If I could download it on my MBP, believe me I would (but I don't believe there is a way round the DR 'wrapper' - is there? If a TT bod could give me a direct link to the file, I could attempt to download it on my Mac and transfer it to the Shuttle via the power of flash memory. Is this possible, Telltale folk...?)

Sorry for the moan, but I'm at a very loose end and I wanna play!!

Cheers, folks,

Sarah

Emily

Here you go: http://files.telltalegames.com/games/SamAndMax_Lincoln_Demo.exe

It's on our server so it'll hopefully be faster.

We'll need to activate it manually - hit Activation Support on the first screen and PM me your hardware fingerprint.

wrpdmnd

I'm having a similar issue. I'll do the same

moonknight

Me too Im also haveing a simmiler problem but how do I get my fingerprint to send to you?
Sorry i see youhave already said in your post

RClarke

Is Telltale putting any serious thought into replacing or offering an alternative digital purchase/DRM system?

I'm getting heartily sick of having to track down the direct download link and then manually activate each episode of the series I've paid for, and I'm not even behind a firewall. I imagine you guys are getting also sick of having to field the same tech support queries every time you release something with Digital River's wrapper attached.

To be honest, I don't think I have the patience to go through the whole tortuous process for the remaining episodes, especially if at the end of it there are still game-breaking memory leaks to content with.

By contrast, I've never had a problem with Trymedia or Softwrap*, which seem to be the systems that most (virtually all) other game publishers use for digital purchases. I'd be genuinely interested to know the reasoning behind choosing Digital River.

*Or Steam for the most part, but I assume that it's a bit far removed from what Telltale are looking for in a DRM system anyway.

Emily

As the people in the trenches dealing with these problems on a daily basis, we're very aware of the system's shortcomings, and have some good ideas for how to improve it. That might not be obvious to you guys because we haven't made changes yet, but that has a lot to do with the fact that we have a new game coming out every month and a steadily growing base of customers receiving these games every month. At this point, the best thing for us to do is to keep refining the system we have wherever possible (and it HAS been refined a lot since episode 1 came out... I know that because with each launch, we get fewer and fewer support emails!) and to cope with the fact that it doesn't work perfectly all the time. Once Season 1 is over and we're not delivering a new game every month, there will be a little more freedom for us to experiment with other ways of doing this that might work better in the long run.

I guess this is my way of saying that no one has to convince us this isn't a perfect system... we know that first hand, and we're working very hard behind the scenes to improve it. It's just not something we can fix overnight, for a variety of reasons, one of the biggest being that we're very busy just releasing the games right now and don't have much wiggle room in the schedule for coming out with a whole new DRM system at the same time.