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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?"
This is both good and bad news.
The Good: FileFront is shutting down, so all of the random junk probably won't have a home and all of the good stuff will find it worthwhile finding a better host that isn't full of adverts and idiots. (I set up one of my websites because the FileFront site was such a horrible place with annoying members and a high noise to signal ratio)
The Bad: The idiots will have to find somewhere else, so we'll have otherwise usable sites suddenly flooded with the "give me it on a silver platter because I can't be bothered while I spout gibberish in badly written and incomprehensible sentences".
I actually agree. Only it should be the game industry that bails it out if they don't want to make legal downloading even more inconvenient and force even more users to warez.
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 have always thought that having to go to a third party site like FileFront to download a patch for a game was ridiculous. If a publisher is releasing a patch they should host it themselves not make their customers jump through hoops registering on a third party site and queueing for a download. And the same goes for games that rely on P2P based updater programs to patch the game.
WoW is one of the worst for this, I don't want to have to download patches using their custom BitTorrent client when it would be 10 times faster from a direct download. I realise that using BitTorrent spreads the load when a new patch comes out but it also hands the bandwidth bill to their customers, some of whom are on low cap connections and just want the patch they need not to burn through a GB of their bandwidth uploading it to other people.
I don't remember FileFront, but I agree with Rapidshare, and especially Fileplanet. I honestly couldn't figure out how Fileplanet stayed in business -- I can't think of a single customer who actually liked it, let alone wanted to pay for it.
The gaming industry is growing up. Amazon S3 is a genuine option. So is Steam, for those trying to sell a game. In fact, I'm pretty sure Fileplanet predates BitTorrent -- and I'm pretty sure I haven't seen it change much since then.
Granted, others are saying FileFront was better, but I really don't care. At the end of the day, what they're offering is a hard disk attached to an HTTP server. That's like ten minutes of work for a competent admin, and both have been commoditized -- as a single entity, with things like Amazon S3.
So, even if it was a good ludicrously obsolete relic of the dot-com boom, it's still a ludicrously obsolete relic of the dot-com boom.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This is personally very sad to me. When my team and I set up BeyondUnreal back in 2001, FileFront was one of our original two file mirrors (eDome was the other). I remember clearly speaking with the great Mark Molinaro of FileFront, who has always been a huge proponent of the open source community, and who was 100% behind supporting our growing Unreal-powered gaming community. Never once in all that time did FileFront waver in their support of our efforts.
Unfortunately, this is a sign of the times. As the ad revenue streams dry up, it becomes more difficult to run ad-supported businesses. eDome suffered the same fate: there was no money in the file hosting business.
Farewell, FileFront, and thank you for being such a good friend to literally THOUSANDS of online communities just like mine.
Why can't they just move to bittorrent? I'm gathering all my clan's favorite CTF maps and will be starting a torrent of them and publicizing it so people don't have to go register at file-sends-you-lots-of-spam-to-buy-their-service-planet.
I will be sad to see FileFront go, they were my favorite. The least nonsense, just click a button and get a usually-anywhere-from-1.3-5megabytes/second-fast download.