FileFront Reopens Its Doors

boarder8925 writes "FileFront, who announced on March 24th that they would be shutting down, has been given new life. The original owners of the website bought it back from Ziff Davis Media, who shut down FileFront because it had become financially unviable. 'We're happy to announce to the gaming community that as of today, April 1st, 2009, FileFront is a completely independent company again and is no longer part of Ziff Davis Media. All previously suspended services should be active and working again. We thank Ziff Davis Media for their cooperation and willingness to keep the site and community alive.' They repeatedly state that this is not an April Fool's Day joke, and indeed the site appears to be up and running as usual."

Comments

Too late

[SupremoMan]

That was stupid of them. I, as well as countless others who used file front before, have moved all the files I had hosted there to another location in anticipation of the close. I don't plan to now move back after all the work I did to leave.

Re:Too late

[Merc248]

It's been a pretty popular site for gamers for quite a while. A probably reason why they went under is not because it was an unknown site (they wouldn't have stuck around for as long as they did if it wasn't known by a good number of people), but because there was no incentive for people to invest money into the site. Fileplanet used to be like FileFront, except they saw that there was something to exploit, so they changed their system into a queue-based system, while offering subscriptions in order to go back to a queue-less system.

FileFront not only has all the perks that one of the posters mentioned already (no queues, fast download speeds, etc.), but also, you can find a lot of obscure mods from 10+ years ago -- as well as patches to extremely old games -- on FileFront. More often than not, I would come up with broken links if I tried to find anything older than 6-8 years on Fileplanet. Not so on FileFront.

In The Front

[Phusion0]

I worked for Filefront as a newsie and then the news manager/editor (2004-2006) and generally enjoyed my time there. I got to assemble my own staff, the guy running all of the files in the background was always top notch and we always managed to get the latest demo files pretty quick. I'm really glad they're not closing, there are so many files and so many MODs hosted there, it would of been a real hit to the gaming community if they closed their doors.