Time-Exclusive Patches Suck!

Do you play Call of Duty 4 on the PC? Earlier this week, Nvidia was granted a 24 hour exclusive on the recent 1.6 patch for CoD4, which includes 4 new maps that the console players had to cough up money for. The reason conjured up was that Nvidia was sponsoring the new maps. Well, normally it wouldn't matter all that much because this being the age of the Internet and all, once something appears on the net everyone else will just grab it and distribute it on their site as well - nothing is truly exclusive.

So this is all well and good for your Call of Duty 4 players, right? Well, no. If you purchased the game digitally, you're fucked. Steam and Direct2Drive customers have to wait for their vendors to be allowed to release their versions of the patch. As of this writing, Steam still does not have the patch released.

Now, doesn't this really defeat the purpose of releasing the patch in the first place? Isn't the basic function of a patch to make a player's experience of the game better, not worse? Instead of playing a couple rounds of multiplayer with my buddies, all of whom have version 1.6, I'm stuck waiting around watching the time pass by while I'm not shooting virtual people in the face.

If sponsored patches are the way of the future, then I'd be very worried as a digital distribution customer. Why should I be forced to wait for something that everyone else gets immediately? Didn't I also pay hard earned money for the same game that retail buyers enjoy? I think I should be entitled to the same rights to a patch as they are.