In Australia you can now buy games from a local online store and burn them to CD or DVD legally – but instead of being able to do it at home, the store has to do it for you, and send you the burnt disc in the mail.

Gamehead.com.au are the first Australian game download service that lets you burn your downloads to CD or DVD. The thing is, you’re still not allowed to burn them in your own home after downloading them. So how do they get burned?

Surprisingly, Gamehead themselves will burn the CD or DVD for you, with any number of titles able to be burnt to disc, be it one, or several, all ultimately depending on how many games will fit on a disc, an important consideration given that many of them are hundreds of megabytes in size.

The disc will be shipped and will arrive at your chosen destination within 2-3 days of ordering them to almost anywhere in Australia, but can be downloaded immediately if desired.

Gamehead claim to be doing this because of the long download times associated with larger games, along with the massive hit huge downloads make to consumer’s download limits as imposed by Australian ISPs. Gamehead also claim that “This means that there is literally no limit to the number of titles that can be purchased from [us]”.

Gamehead claims to offer Australia’s largest range of downloadable games, and say that their download service is groundbreaking technology, with burned discs delivered in a professional style with a professionally presented disc.

Gamehead spokesperson Dale Miller says, “Australian game enthusiasts can now get the games they want – when, where and how they want them, rather than conforming to the distributor’s delivery system. And they have a permanent copy of the game, giving them great value for money.”

While the ability to purchase games online and have them sent to you in bulk is a good idea, it’s one that any games retailer can offer by sending you the game pre-manufactured elsewhere in the original packaging, although competitors will not consolidate games onto one or more discs for you, and can only send you the original boxed game – if it is available in stock.

So, from the point of view of giving you a virtually unlimited library of games to legally download and have burnt to disc for you, it’s a very interesting idea and one that is likely to strike some fear into major retailers and specialist games retailers who may now decide to offer the same service.

It’s also something that is likely to disappear in the future as broadband speeds get ever faster, download limits get larger or disappear altogether, and ever more games are made available through the download services of games consoles and ISPs such as Australia’s dominant ISP BigPond with their BigPond games download service, which does not, at this stage, offer burn to disc services.

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Entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 8:42 am under Legal.

Read more entries by Alex Zaharov-Reutt.
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