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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.
Honestly, this is such a win-win, I don't know who companies don't do it more. You're not going to get significant revenue still selling these old titles, yet companies go after people for sharing 20 year old abandonware titles for some crazy reason.
When EA gives a game like this away for free, they get good PR, and they possibly create a new audience to suddenly look at the sequels to these games if perhaps they might not have otherwise.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I can actually get behind this policy. While I have a problem with advertisements in games for which I've paid full price, I have absolutely no problem putting up with reasonably placed McDonald's interstitial ads or menu banners if I know it's allowing me to play the game for free. An ad-supported, digitally-distributed model for older games is a recipe for success in my book and I'd support the model enthusiastically. I don't want to see it become the primary model for games, as I'm quite happy to shell out full price for a quality game with no advertisements at all. However, if someone were to make Freespace 2 (or hell, even the old Wing Commander games) available with this model, I'd sign up immediately.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
You're right. They totally remove the ads, and make it available for $$ or not at all.
Honestly. You guys are a bunch of whiney, ungrateful jerks. The Ubisoft games aren't even that old--the Prince of Persia title's from 2003 and FarCry's from 2004, which puts them both in the $20 budget bin. And Rayman Raving Rabbids (which is conspicuously absent from the summary above) isn't even a year old. Seriously, what do you want for nothing?
Canthros
The duke nukem 3D CD had all 3 of the previous duke CDs on it. sort of like the baen e-book thing, now I think of it
The main game executable has a call at the very beginning to DFHInitialize. Removing that removes all the ads.
Enjoy. Be that as it may, it negates the whole point of ad-supported games. If I were going to do what you suggest, I might as well just get a warez copy of the game in the first place. Not only would I not have to register and perform any extra steps post-install, I'd also get to use a torrent with great download speed (as opposed to waiting for an hour or two in the "download queue").
I'm not against ad-supported games - in fact I think it's a great idea, especially for low-income gamers. I have a problem with this particular execution, though.
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
Does anything?
(Yeah, flag me as a troll... I don't care. It was a joke, and I am an Ubuntu user. Now the question is, will anyone with mod points actually READ this far. If so, please mod it as interesting. Consider it a social experiment to see if anyone reads beyond the opening comment without bothering to see the context.)
Blizzard would HAPPILY give out a copy of World of Warcraft free to anyone who asks, if it were a good economic decision for them. Its not (or rather, was not at launch and will not be at the launch of each expansion pack for a few years yet). In the US, good high speed bandwidth is rare, and WoW is huge. The most efficient form of distributing untold terabytes of textures across the Internets is to not use the Internet at all, but rather to burn it on CDs, put the CDs in warehouses, and move from warehouses to retail outlets where your customers shop. (Also note that customers and users of MMORPGs are not necessarily the same people. Remember, although its changing slowly, a huge percentage of the video game market is gifts from Mom to child, and Mom may not get the same experience out of giving an emailed "CD" key rather than something wrappable.)
The problem? Retail outlets don't stock CDs just to make you happy -- you have to have a proposition for them to make money from the deal. The solution is to charge for a box what every other A list title costs, and give them an exclusivity deal -- that is why no A list MMORPGs offer online distribution for several months after release despite it being a technological no-brainer (after all, they do onlnie distribution for the beta, which in late stage is 100% the same product as the retail release). If you don't give them exclusivity, or if you drop the price on your CD to where it is nominal, they drop your MMORPG and use the shelf space for Sims: Fighting Aliens in the 'Hood or whatever that cash cow is on these days. (Which would you rather have, as a retailer? 50% of a $49.95 sale of GTA42: Vatican City or a $1 per CD bounty for giving out the AOL-esque "Free WoW trial!" CDs?)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
damn me and that submit button...
"Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?"
I know it isn't.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating