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?"

Comments

One Word: Bailout

[Anenome]

Clearly Filefront is too big to fail, let's talk bailout. I can have Obama on the phone in 15 minutes flat, how's 2... no, $10 billion sound?

Re:One Word: Bailout

[Anenome]

Are you crazy, $20 million? WTF is wrong with you, $20 billion more like. Okay, $40 billion, you talked me into it. This is a crisis WORSE THAN THE GREAT DEPRESSION, duh? To hell with it, new plan: we send $1 billion to everyone in the USA, that will -seriously- ramp up spending, I'm super seriously. And don't you dare call this trying to dig your way out of a hole :P

Re:One Word: Bailout

[ahac]

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.

Re:One Word: Bailout

[wisty]

If Bernanke is still looking for worthless (sorry, no market value) assets to "invest" in, to lower rates below zero, then I have some papers he might be interested in.

Re:One Word: Bailout

[adavies42]

i love that this is "insightful"....

Re:One Word: Bailout

[electrosoccertux]

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.

Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Good riddance, always despised that site.

Re:Yay

[Lifyre]

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.

Re:Yay

[ch1lly]

You are thinking of Fileplanet. I'm sad to see this site go because at least for me the downloads were fast and very minor to no waits with no hassle, unlike the aforementioned.

Re:Yay

[CAIMLAS]

It's too bad, really. I remember when FilePlanet was actually a really good site to get patches, mods, and demos from.

As FilePlanet (and similar sites) became shittier, I actually found myself more inclined to look on various warez sites for full game versions. Or, as more often happened, I'd just not bother and pull out an old-but-good game and play that instead.

Maybe if they didn't suck the brass nob so hard, they'd not be going away.

Re:Yay

[Jurily]

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.

In these cases, do a favor for all of us: download it, then seed a new torrent on TPB. If everyone played this game, we wouldn't have this issue.

Re:Yay

[Lifyre]

I have on occasion, but I have to deem it important enough to put up with the shit first.

Re:Yay

[mobby_6kl]

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.

Re:Yay

[dzfoo]

So, what you are saying is that the site ultimately sucked, right? Then you seem to concur with the original poster. He didn't say it was designed badly or that he hated it from the moment it started. He merely stated that he "despised it". Your comment sure doesn't evoke much love for the site either.

        -dZ.

Re:Yay

[MrAngryForNoReason]

do a favor for all of us: download it, then seed a new torrent on TPB

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.

Re:Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Blizzard's BT client does have an option to disable the p2p function and directly download the patch from their servers. This is generally significantly faster than using the p2p option anyway.

Re:Yay

[jalefkowit]

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.

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.

Re:Yay

[spyrochaete]

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.

Re:Yay

[MrAngryForNoReason]

I've heard many people make this claim before but I've never ever seen it in practise

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.

Re:Yay

[geminidomino]

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.

Re:Yay

[mobby_6kl]

No, that's not really what I'm saying at all. Would you say the McLaren F1 ultimately sucked because it's been discontinued 11 years ago after only 106 were made? It's possible that the parent poster also received a similar error, but by equating it with Fileplanet the impression was made that these two sites were equally bad.

Also, "despise" is quite a strong word for something that works quite well and is much better than most competition, which was the case with FF here. So sure, a clear message like "We're sorry we can't provide this service to our EU guests" would be nicer than a generic error, but this is a minor complaint.

Re:Yay

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

Re:Yay

[spyrochaete]

Fair point. My sources are reliable (megagames.com and gamecopyworld.com) but I suppose I take for granted however difficult it may be to learn about sites like these for the first time.

Re:Yay

[Kamokazi]

Actually I quite liked FileFront. High download speeds (it nearly caps out my 10Mb connection), a limited number of ads, and no waiting in line, unlike the eyesore that is FilePlanet. I'm sad to see it go. I think you all are just lumping them together when they really are not one in the same.

Re:Yay

[pak9rabid]

All patches for id software games can be found on their anonymous ftp server: ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com

Getting a decent download rate, however, is another story.

Re:Yay

[tepples]

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.

Then why don't the publishers of non-free video game demos and patches put their files' SHA-whatever sums on some web site like much of the free software community does?

Re:Yay

[tepples]

Unfortunately since Windows doesn't come with a tool like md5sum

Then wouldn't it be the job of some trade group like the ESA?

1. The group commissions a Windows shell extension that lets the user right-click one or more files and get a window showing the MD5 and SHA-1 values for the selected files.
2. Group members' web sites post this shell extension for download.
3. Group members authorize the P2P distribution of demos and patches and publish the SHA-1 values of the correct files on an HTTPS site.

But they don't do that because it would make sense. Instead of relying on the existing HTTPS public key infrastructure, they sometimes feel the need to use Authenticode, which has its own brokennesses.

Re:Yay

[jalefkowit]

Well, if they really cared about helping users ensure they were downloading genuine patches, they could just post the checksums and a link to one of the 40 million free md5 tools for Windows. But they don't, so they don't.

Re:Yay

[slaker]

The crackers themselves are generally cool, I will agree, but there are some corners of the Internets that can get your PC in some seriously obnoxious shit if you aren't careful.

For example, you can read about this bit of nasty code that's distributed through image links on Warez sites. (I believe a free, painless registration is required to read the full article)

Basically, PC gaming is so massively unappealing at this point to me not because I need the latest hardware or to fiddle with drivers, but because I can't stand the copy protection on retail (packaged) games and what they might be doing to my PC, I can't tolerate Steam and its reliance on servers I may or may not have access to when I want to play, or cracked games, with the disturbing implications for PC security that come from non-official packages. Those three things don't leave me with a whole lot of options, especially since I hate console game control systems.

Re:Yay

[skeeto]

I think you are mixing them up with FilePlanet, which isn't worth using.

Re:Yay

[jgtg32a]

Really, I'm going to have to set that when I get home.

Re:Yay

[dave562]

Mod this post to oblivion. Megagames.com serves up Javascript malware. I'm not going anywhere near Gamecopyworld.com because I figure it's the same deal.

Re:Yay

[spyrochaete]

Wow, really? I honestly had no idea. I use Firefox with noscript and flashblock so I'm pretty much immune to that sort of stuff. I guess I'll have to advise everyone to do the same before visting those sites. Sorry if I ruffled any feathers!

Re:Yay

[Skal Tura]

Indeed, all of those are total pain to use, but i guess they make good money, there's a lot of services like Rapidshare.

Re:Yay

[Fluffeh]

I always download the patches from a mirror file anyhow. Being in Aus I use gamearena.com.au which is a Bigpond owned site. Comes down pretty quick.

Re:Yay

[sortius_nod]

No, Filefront is/was as bad as fileplanet. Both used to be great, but then they got greedy.

I'd prefer to torrent stuff than use these sites.

Re:Yay

[Mozk]

(I believe a free, painless registration is required to read the full article)

BugMeNot.com

Re:Yay

[ukyoCE]

Couple tips:

1) You have to forward the BT port through your home router for the p2p to work.

2) p2p takes a bit to ramp up, but it's substantially faster than pulling from Blizzard's servers. I see this every patch because my comp has the port forwarded and my laptop doesn't.

Re:Yay

[LordSnooty]

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.

Unless you happen to use an ISP that has transparent proxies, then you can never download a file because someone else in your region of about 2 million people used it in the last four hours. If I see Rapidshare, I stop immediately.

Re:Yay

[Walter Carver]

Rapidshare doesn't have a captcha for a long time. It has a time delay for free users.

Clearly...

[rincebrain]

Clearly, we mirror it all onto archive.org.

Re:Clearly...

[Fotograf]

lol

Re:Clearly...

[ausekilis]

I take your suggestion and offer one higher. Bittorrent, where all your friends and others you've never met host all your files for you.

Re:Clearly...

[Hatta]

And how is Archive.org handling this economic crisis? There's no guarantee it will be around forever either.

Re:Clearly...

[Gothic_Walrus]

And how is Archive.org handling this economic crisis?

With a new 4.5 petabyte data center.

Re:Solution: Bittorrent.

[Tukz]

Torrent trackers don't actually contain any files.

Your suggestion would require someone to actually seed the files to a torrent tracker.

Re:Solution: Bittorrent.

[mlts]

A bittorrent tracker is nice, but when people stop seeding, the content is as good as dead. Perhaps combine a tracker with a host that always seeds the stuff so at least there is one host that people can get content from, and if they are polite, they will stay on until they have uploaded as much as they downloaded.

time for devs to host stuff

[cliffski]

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.

Re:time for devs to host stuff

[mlts]

The thing is that some file hosting is pretty expensive, especially if the demo program is pretty big. A lot of ISPs will charge by the gig, so people accessing a multi-gigabyte app will get expensive quite quickly. Even something fairly small (60-100 megs) will add up fast if it gets popular.

I know registration sucks, but downloads before Web, FTP and others were pretty rough. If you were new to the BBS scene, you had to either pay a sysop for download credit, or find someway of finding something relevant you can upload before you could download a single bit. Of course, you had to make some inane posts to the board's forums due to post/call radios, and all this was assuming you could get something else than a busy signal if you are trying to get to a popular board.

Re:time for devs to host stuff

[jalefkowit]

The thing is that some file hosting is pretty expensive, especially if the demo program is pretty big.

Maybe if publishers had to bear the cost of hosting multi-hundred-megabyte patches themselves instead of shunting it off onto third parties, they'd work harder before release to ensure that their product won't require multi-hundred-megabyte patches...

Re:time for devs to host stuff

[Bieeanda]

Sites like Filefront also provide a lot of bandwidth for mods and other community-developed content. It's not just big-name developers and publishers.

Re:time for devs to host stuff

[cliffski]

I couldn't agree more. With the exception of us indie devs, the ability to put together games in small file sizes has become a lost art. People actually ship demos with wavs rather than oggs, and bmps when jpgs would do. Identical geometry and textures get released in a single installation, and textures are often larger than they will ever appear onscreen.
The worst sin is devs which release demos containing tons of art and sound assets that can never be used in the demo level. This still goes on, because nobody is ever at any stage given an incentive to keep the filesize down.
I pay per gigabyte when people download my demos, and I keep them as small as I can.

Re:time for devs to host stuff

[PingSpike]

While I agree including assets that are not used in the demo levels is lazy and wasteful...I don't understand the problem with using WAVS or BMPs actually. Everything should be compressed into the executable anyway. Yes, jpegs or mp3 result in a lower overall filesize...but they result in loss of quality to acheive this. Some users might find this acceptable to quicken the download and get a taste of the action, but I feel that most would probably just say that you game had crappy graphics or bad sound.

Re:time for devs to host stuff

[cliffski]

I can't tell much difference between ogg and wav when it comes to stuff like bullet sounds or footsteps. Can you? Mp3 is a bit tinny, but ogg sounds perfect to me.
And a LOT of artwork in games can get away with compression. When artists have to zoom in to maximum zoom and look at two image side by side, you know you are just wasting bandwidth.

Re:time for devs to host stuff

[skeeto]

Anyone can distribute popular data very cheaply now-a-days. It happens all the time with new television episodes: there are generally only one or two unique video encodings of a single episode, and tens of thousands of people have it within a few hours of it hitting the net. Except for the the torrent trackers, this all happens entirely on consumer hardware.

Patches even have the advantage over the above example by being legal.

The company should first run a torrent tracker for the patch and remain in the torrent as a permanent seed. Then give very clear, explicit permission for anyone to be able to distribute the patch, and supply MD5 checksums of the patch on the official website. That way anyone can download a patch from any of the many mirrors that will inevitably go up, and verify the integrity with MD5. The company could even digitally sign patches too.

Except for the MD5/signature part, this is what Blizzard does successfully. Side note: because the torrent file contains hashes, one could potentially use the torrent file from Blizzard to verify the integrity of a mirror's patch, so an MD5 checksum would just be a convenience thing.

Re:time for devs to host stuff

[dave562]

If you were new to the BBS scene, you had to either pay a sysop for download credit, or find someway of finding something relevant you can upload before you could download a single bit.

Back when zero day meant something.

Re:time for devs to host stuff

[shutdown -p now]

The thing is that some file hosting is pretty expensive, especially if the demo program is pretty big. A lot of ISPs will charge by the gig, so people accessing a multi-gigabyte app will get expensive quite quickly. Even something fairly small (60-100 megs) will add up fast if it gets popular.

I know registration sucks, but downloads before Web, FTP and others were pretty rough. If you were new to the BBS scene, you had to either pay a sysop for download credit, or find someway of finding something relevant you can upload before you could download a single bit. Of course, you had to make some inane posts to the board's forums due to post/call radios, and all this was assuming you could get something else than a busy signal if you are trying to get to a popular board.

One word: BitTorrent.

Re:time for devs to host stuff

[whoop]

This is Slashdot. People here will claim to know the difference between every possible combination of audio/video codecs, file format, bitrate, etc. And my silent FLAC collection is way more clear than my neighbor's crappy 128kb MP3 silent audio files. I can hear the silence WAY, WAY better.

Good and bad news!

[IBBoard]

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".

Re:Good and bad news!

[BikeHelmet]

What's wrong with filefront?

I remember looking for an obscure Supreme Commander patch(version x.x.xx.xx.xxxx to version x.x.xx.xx.xxxx), and that was one of the few sites that had it. Fileplanet would throw me in a queue for 45 mins, then give me sub-par DL speeds. Filefront always maxed out my 3mbit connection, for every download, and let me download it right away.

I have adblock, so... what ads? :P

I liked FileFront.

Re:Good and bad news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously becuase I'm going against Slashdot groupthink, and am likely to be modded down.

I have adblock, so... what ads? :P

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.

Re:Good and bad news!

[Animaether]

I have adblock, so... what ads? :P

I liked FileFront.

You didn't like them nearly enough, clearly.

That's not to say that I believe your particular blocking of their ads is directly responsible for their downfall - but the many thousands of people blocking ads can't have helped. I'm as fond of adblock as the next guy, but if I like a free site and it hasn't thrown some full-page Flash ad at me yet, they can shovel ads in my face all they like - I get a free service in return, I have no complaints.

Re:Good and bad news!

[mgblst]

I have adblock, so... what ads? :P

mmm.. I think we have found the problem guys.

Re:Good and bad news!

[NeoSkandranon]

How are medium-large site owners supposed to pay their bills?

To summarize the prevailing groupthink: There's no ethical difficulty in using a service that is nominally paid for via ad serving and then blocking the ads regardless of intrusiveness. Oh and we don't want to pay for content either.

Re:Good and bad news!

[Kiuas]

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.

Re:Good and bad news!

[IBBoard]

I've got adblock too, but not everyone does so saying "go to gamename.filefront.com" used to assault them with excessive horrible ads, including popups at one point. That was why one of my sites was set up with the aim of not having any adverts on it at all and serving quality content.

As for what's wrong with it, I already said. For the games I play it has too much rubbish on there (Football team badges in the 41st millenium? Random corporation logos? Other miscellany junk?) and too many idiots. I tried to help out on the FileFront forums for a while, posting pointers to tutorials etc, but the general response was "those two steps are too complex - do it for me now" (complete with unintelligible half-sentences).

Re:Good and bad news!

[IBBoard]

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.

So what you need is a sustainable income to support it, which adverts aren't.

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.

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.

How are medium-large site owners supposed to pay their bills?

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.

Working on the Internet is an utterly thankless task sometimes.

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.

Re:Good and bad news!

[Nick Ives]

I remember looking for an obscure Supreme Commander patch(version x.x.xx.xx.xxxx to version x.x.xx.xx.xxxx), and that was one of the few sites that had it.

I remember the days when publishers were responsible for patches. In the long, dark past before the internet was popular a publisher once sent me a patch for a buggy game on CD, for free.

Re:Good and bad news!

[IBBoard]

In the long, dark past before the internet was popular a publisher once sent me a patch for a buggy game on CD, for free.

Now that is caring for your customers. They probably had fewer customers back then, but publishers should take more responsibility for their products after release by hosting the patches.

Re:Good and bad news!

[Nick Ives]

Actually the publisher was terrible. The game in question was the second Elite sequel, Frontier: First Encounters. They released an alpha demo that David Braben had sent them as the full game because they wanted it out for Christmas '95.

I think a few patches came out but the final patch only stopped the game from crashing, the main story missions were never fully implemented, although you can see some of the mission texts if you look in the binary.

Braben sued Gametek and they went bust in '98. Braben got an out of court settlement in '99 I assume from the administrators. I bet they only sent out the patch disks to stave off an immediate class action.

Re:Good and bad news!

[BikeHelmet]

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 don't click ads. Would you rather have me wasting their bandwidth?

Kiuas already summed it up, below:

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.

Re:Good and bad news!

[cp.tar]

I can't see why people would click on ads they consider irritating even if they would see them.

You're seriously overestimating the rationality of human beings. Study after study after study shows that human beings are easily influenced by advertising, even when they claim they're not, even when they find the advertising "annoying." As the saying goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Yes, there is.
This human not only reacts to heavy advertising with ad blocking, but also tends to boycott products whose commercials annoy him.

Now that I have fulfilled my monthly quota of talking about myself in the 3rd person, I withdraw.

Re:Good and bad news!

[IBBoard]

Ah, it seemed like good customer service without all of the detail! Still, more companies should do the "caring to some degree about customers after the sale is made and not just ignoring you because they made their money" bit.

Re:The date?

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

I'm sorry, does everyone forget the date around this time of year?

Unfortunate timing, yes, but I think this is legitimate. If you're going to fool people, you normally don't announce and execute your prank before April 1st actually arrives.

Good news

[MemoryDragon]

When those services appeared sort of like a middle men mostly between me and a public ftp server the first days. I thought to myself, another idiocy which hit the web. Ok I know filefront and others nowadays host content themselves, but it still is rather pointless even to use such a service for a quick sharing of files.

I am sad

[SupremoMan]

I just moved there from RapidShare to store some stuff after I found out RapidShare now deletes file after x amount of downloads (I think 10). And now I have to move again. Sure it wasn't perfect, but it was FREE as in BEER.

And I'm not entirely against using Darwinian tactics to weed out the computer clueless form the internet. If you can't figure out what link is the actual download link, then maybe you shouldn't have the file.

Meh

[KDR_11k]

I really don't care. All that site ever did was annoy me. I don't think it even works with cookies disabled (it's a fucking file host, what does it need cookies for???). Or maybe it just doesn't work with Opera at ALL. Either of those. Dunno but I can't bring myself to care about the death of a site that made it unnecessarily complicated to get to a download and that companies would use to dump huge and popular files onto (resulting in abysmal download rates and really long queues). I avoided them as much as I could.

Re:Solution: Bittorrent.

[rm999]

Yes, obviously. They currently spend the money on a server anyway, so this wouldn't be some huge change. Instead of a couple dozen devoted servers sending files at 200 kb/sec, they could have a dozen servers permanently seeding 1000s of files each. With some overlap, the whole system would be automatically distributed and redundant.

The biggest benefit to the company would be the ability to decrease the peak bandwidth for the rare cases a popular file is uploaded. The peer cloud would get huge right when they need it to, and then when downloads trickle down the servers and and few remaining seeders could fill the tiny demand.

The biggest problem I see is that once a file is being seeded by a bunch of other people, it's hard to justify charging for extra speed because it's out of the company's control. The company can still charge extra for downloading a file earlier than free users, and it can still make the free user wait 60 seconds to start the torrent download.

Very sad to hear

[P-38Jbird]

Filefront is my first stop for demos and mods, ect.. Never had a problem downloading from them. Where will I go now? Fileplanet suks big ones. I stopped using them long ago.

So long, good friend!

[QAPete]

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.

Or...

[Anachragnome]

Game companies could provide their customers with a portal to post game videos?

Sorry, I don't know what the fuck I was thinkin'. Providing a means for customers to tout your product always seems to backfire...

my 19 year old boss

[Phusion0]

I was the "executive news editor" at Filefront from 2004-2006. Everything went as well as it could, I had a 19 year old boss and upper management I'd never met. Covering E3 2004 was a blast though, watching my PR manager get totally pwned by Fata1ity in UT was a treat.

Other download sites out there

[apn_k]

There is still http://www.gamershell.com/ for those of you who don't like Fileplanet.