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FileFront Shutting Down
Axodious writes "As of March 30th, FileFront, one of the most popular repositories for sharing online gaming videos, will be suspended due to the recent economic downfall. In a brief post, FileFront's management said, 'We regret to inform you that due to the current economic conditions we are forced to indefinitely suspend the FileFront site operations on March 30, 2009. If you have uploaded files, images or posted blogs, or if you would like to download some of your favorite files, please take this opportunity to download them before March 30th when the site will be suspended.' With FileFront shutting down, what will be next? Fileplanet?"
Agreed, everytime I was looking for a file and the only hosts were filefront and fileplanet I figured I didn't really need the file and went to go do something else.
It's pretty much the same with Rapidshare etc... these day. If I can't get it from a website that isn't a pain to use or a torrent it's not important enough to download.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
I've always hated intermediary sites that exist purely because developers and publishers wanted to save a few pennies on file hosting.
If, as a gem developer I want you to try my demos, watch my videos and look at my screenshots, I'll host them myself. That way I have 100% uptime, I know tjhey are easy to find, there are no ads or registration screens or other fuss to get between my customers and my product, and both me and my customers are happy.
I know that letting filefront host stuff would save me bandwidth, but these days bandwidth is cheap, and I work hard to keep demo file-sizes down. the idea of a 1 gig demo for a game is laughable.
Plus, demos and trailers are MARKETING. Of course I want to get this stuff direct to gamers as easily and hassle-free as possible.
I'm sure some big companies who are incapable of making games under 3 gigs will mourn the loss, but I can't say I'm one of them. Direct hosting FTW.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
What? Are you sure you aren't confusing anything? FileFront was totaly awesome not too long ago... until it suddenly wasn't. You could easily browse the files by games and categories (mods, maps, models, etc), then select one of the few mirrors and download it without any further bullshit. FilePlanet, on the other hand, was pretty bad and IIRC required registration or even paid subscription to get anything, and then you still had to wait in the queue before you could start downloading.
FileFront's demise for me came when I once couldn't download anything. I don't remember the specific error, but at first it looked like it might be a temporary problem which could be solved by simply trying later. I never managed to bypass it though, and a few searches revealed that it was a common error for european users. Apparently this was their way of not servicing some countries/regions.
Rapidshare's entirely different matter, but even then it's not that bad if you need just one file as all you have to deal with is a captcha.
This wouldn't be an issue if publishers provided md5 checksums for the patches, so you could confirm it was unmodified. Unfortunately since Windows doesn't come with a tool like md5sum, most game publishers don't seem to think it's useful to provide checksums for their files. Grrr.
Read my blog.
I would be wary about downloading content like game patches from a torrent site. There is a long history of crackers using altered versions of patches and keygens to spread malware.
I've heard many people make this claim before but I've never ever seen it in practise, and I've been using game cracks since I first acquired them with a 2400 baud modem. In my experience the cracking scene is basically a global competition to become the most reputable, famous, skillful cracker. Maybe your experience differs but I've had absolutely nothing but convenience and quality in game cracks over the last 16 years or so.
A lot of keygens and cracks have trojans in them, less so with releases from major groups but often the cracks the groups release are altered and reposted with trojans tacked on. There was a trend at one point for hiding trojans in fake keygens that sniffed the registry for cd keys. These cd keys were then added into new versions of the 'key-gens' that were actually just a static list of keys pretending to be generated by the program.
As you say the people who actually crack the games have their own ethics so their releases are normally free of malware but it is trivial for someone with no such ethics to download their release and add malware to it.
Posting anonymously becuase I'm going against Slashdot groupthink, and am likely to be modded down.
This is probably what killed their site. Hosting -- once you get to the large VPS/dedicated server level -- is expensive. Hosting for a high bandwidth site is extremely expensive.
They couldn't pay their bills because advertising on the 'net is a failing industry. The reason for that is people like you blocking adverts.
I'm sure plenty of people will reply to this saying that adverts on many sites suck, are intrusive and annoying. Well, maybe, but that doesn't mean you should block all ads on every site. How are medium-large site owners supposed to pay their bills?
Working on the Internet is an utterly thankless task sometimes.
I've heard many people make this claim before but I've never ever seen it in practise, and I've been using game cracks since I first acquired them with a 2400 baud modem. In my experience the cracking scene is basically a global competition to become the most reputable, famous, skillful cracker. Maybe your experience differs but I've had absolutely nothing but convenience and quality in game cracks over the last 16 years or so.
It depends on where you get the cracks. If you've got direct connections "in the scene," yeah, you're pretty safe. OTOH, if you rely on things like IRC channels or .box.sk to find your cracks, then the guys making the cracks/keygens available usually aren't the same ones who wrote it. It's passed through a lot of grubby paws of people who don't care about cracking reputation.
The reason for that is people like you blocking adverts.
The sites don't get money from just people who visit the site and see the ads, people have to actually click them. I understand your point but your theory presumes that people who block the ads would click them if they didn't block them.
Before I began using Firefox with adblock I considered ads as mainly a nuisance because, like you said, they were often intrusive and made it harder to find the stuff I was looking for from the site. Due to this I simply learned to ignore the ads and I can count on one hand's fingers the occasions on which I actually clicked some ad.
The problem is not with the people. People block the ads because they're annoying and hence not very interesting. The problem is the ads themselves. The advertisement tactic used in the net is too much based on the same tactic companies use on the streets: The bigger the better. On the streets this work because the bigger and more colourful the ad is the more chance there is that people will notice it. However, when you make the ads on the net big, colourful and often moving (sometimes even with sound effects) and then fill a webpage with these ads they stop working and instead of arousing interest you're just making people annoyed.
I can't see why people would click on ads they consider irritating even if they would see them. Now that there are free and easy-to-use tools that efficiently block the ads of course people will use it, but it's not their "fault", it's the advertisers fault for making ads too damn frustraiting. So in short: Ad blocking is not the cause, it's an effect. The core of the problem lies within the business model of web advertising.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
So what you need is a sustainable income to support it, which adverts aren't.
No, as pointed out by other people, the reason it is failing is because of the way the industry behaves. Of the tens of thousands (or more) of ads that AdBlock has blocked for me I'd probably have clicked on a grand sum of about two of them at most, if it was really interesting. Maybe if things were less intrusive and more targetted to the audience of the site showing the advert then people might be more likely to click on them and less likely to block them.
Targetted affiliate links? Targetted self-hosted adverts? Sponsored links? I'm hardly doing any work and every month I've more than recovered the cost of my VPS account, sometimes several times over. That's just with two affiliate links that I use in targetted locations appropriate to each link.
Exactly, and people shouldn't expect to be bailed out by visitors and advertising. I host my sites a) because I want to b) because I enjoy working with it and improving it and c) because I know that people are making use of things even if they don't say anything or give any feedback.