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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.
Me: -1
Apparently, if you burn the iso to a disc, and then follow these steps[.DOC warning], it works. I haven't verified this though.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
These companies are finally allowing people to play these great, (some) historic games without the legal ambiguities of abandonware hanging around their neck. For us old farts and the occasional curious young gamer, being able to play C&C95 at any time is not only a great marketing tool for EA, but it is an important piece of gaming history that is now freely available. GJ to EA (for once) and Ubisoft. Oh, and not to snub Prince of Persia: I love PoP:SoT, which has a significant place in the history of platformers, and hope that it will eventually be phased to freeware (I understand the ads for now, due to bandwidth costs).
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.
No, last I checked any fileplanet registration was enough to d/l these. I.e. the free registration, the one where most ppl make up thier login info?
Take a game that's already made it's money back, and probably sells all of 2 copies a month, but hey, let's make some more money from it! Always with the string attached. Dang money-grubbing companies. *sigh* I tell ya, as far as I can recall, there hasn't been a game released without strings since Guitar Hero.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
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.
I've downloaded Rayman Raving Rabids to check it out. There's just one ad - a pretty bad macdonalds one.
You get the ad:
1. When the game starts,
2. Before every level,
3. After every level
This means if you play 3x 30-second levels you get 6x 30-second ad.
I guess they looked at how the TV ads have been progressing in few past few years, added a quick spell of reductio ad absurdum and crapped out the result.
Funny part is, I might've actually kept the game if there were some variety to ads and/or they showed up in longer intervals - at least 5 minutes or so..
P.S. for some reason they make you link the game to your ubi.com account...
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I just stopped playing those games anyway. None of them was really any fun and I got sick of seeing real life friends refusing to go do real life things because they had to camp and wait (for hours!) for the magic penis stretcher to reappear so they could continue on their quest.
Still, I think they should just roll the development costs into what is covered by subscriptions. I'd be more likely to try more of the games if I could do it without having to buy anything.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Fnord.
why the european people never get the good things?
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.)
Don't you know that in order to be modded up for something like this you have to start the comment with:
Nephilium
Did they release any of my favorites, like TripTik Hunter IV, Roadside Assist - The Awakening, or Extreme Traveler's Check Speed Signing?
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
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.
getting a gift pufferfish to eat from China. Dont accidentally install Direct X 3.0 , or adobe, or... Also it doesn't appear to work with XP Service Pack 2. I had to crank out my old laptop to play it. On my newer computer, it kept freezing anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes into the game even after fiddling with all the settings and compatability.
damn me and that submit button...