Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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?
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
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"
Clearly, we mirror it all onto archive.org.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
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.
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.