Digg-style Voting for Video Game Downloads

I love to download and play a demo of the latest video games so that I can see what is worth buying. Besides demos, there are important post-release patches that I need and some amazing mods that extend the life of classic games like Doom and Half Life.

The problem is that the demo files are usually around 1GB in size. The Bioshock demo weighed in at 1.93GB (well worth it though). Plus, the official servers can be brutally slow. Try telling your kid that they can’t play on Club Penguin because Daddy is downloading the Hitman: Blood Money demo.

The solution for the download crazy gamer has been to slog it out for the better part of a day on official distribution sites. Or one can go to classic forum-based communities, where you have to weed through tons of listings and have to pray that you don’t spend 2 hours downloading a broken file… or worse.

Until now that is. FileRadar has melded the social voting model of Digg with the power of an open community for file distribution. I found FileRadar a few weeks ago thanks to a Techcrunch post and I’ve been hooked ever since. The result for me is less time downloading, less time searching, and the fun of giving my opinion to help the community. Plus, I love to see voting systems and social bookmarking concepts applied to a niche.

Here’s how it works. You, fellow gamers and other distribution sites submit links to the demo, mod or patch for a particular video game. Then that adoring, yet equally flame-ready community of video game fanatics votes up the game file content with a “blip”. Then for each link submission, the community votes on your individual download quality and can make comments.

To find the recently released free, full version of Far Cry from a quality source, all I had to do was check the “blips” and quality ratings and then start downloading. FileRadar also helps you find what you want through an array of great sorting options, classic search functions, and a series of leaderboards.

If you are interested in social voting and bookmarking and how to apply it to a niche, I definitely recommend seeing what FileRadar has done. If you want a World of Warcraft mod while you are there, then you are in the right spot.