Companies Offer AAA Games For 'Free'

Both Ubisoft and EA are offering up free games to cash-conscious gamers this week. For the low, low cost of nothing you can play titles like Command and Conquer Gold, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and Far Cry. The catch? Well, EA's offering is totally gratis; 1995's C&C Gold is a gift to gamers for supporting the series for all these years. The Ubisoft games, though, are only "free". They're available from Fileplanet in ad-supported format.

Comments

Re:It's a game-flavored ad

[ASkGNet]

The ads are laughable. All of the advertising is done by DFHEngine.dll, which hooks D3D9 renderer to do its bidding.
The main game executable has a call at the very beginning to DFHInitialize. Removing that removes all the ads.

Enjoy.

Re:Games with subscriptions should be free.

[Enderandrew]

The game has a heavy development cost, actually moreso than a standard game. When you buy the retail box, you are paying the developers for the initial cost of devlopment. The servers and bandwidth also cost money, and developers are expected to constantly squash bugs, and release new content to keep you playing, thus the subscription price.

If you don't like it, check out something like Guild Wars (more of a slimmed down title, but cheaper) or Planeshift, which is free last time I checked.