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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.
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?
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"?
'Guitar Hero' with strings would end up just being 'Guitar', I reckon.
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 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.
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Fnord.