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

Kudos for them

[Enderandrew]

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.

An excellent policy

[Puff of Logic]

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.

Re:Boo ads

[Canthros]

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?

Re:It's a game-flavored ad

[Fry-kun]

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. 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.