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

Bailout

[Anenome]

See, FileFront got their bailout, THE SYSTEM WORKS.

Re:Bailout

[Fluffeh]

They were clearly too big to fail.

Re:Bailout

[palegray.net]

Nah, they're obviously morally opposed to shutting down before Duke Nukem Forever is released, meaning they're going to be around until the heat death of the universe.

Yay I suppose

[MLS100]

Filefront, while a little obnoxious in presentation, is(was?*) one of the better file hosting sites.

It was generally fast enough, had no registration requirement for download (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), did not have those stupid timers you have to wait on, which you inevitably forget about, then when you finally remember, they are expired and you have to start the process over again, and had a generous size limit.

*I haven't used filefront in roughly three years.

Re:Yay I suppose

[SuperMo0]

That ease of use is probably what helped make them unprofitable, sadly. When you're the easiest place to download from, people will use you more often. FilePlanet succeeds because of its annoying queues keeping more impatient users away, while getting all the perks of being an IGN subsidiary by having all those exclusive beta keys that you can ONLY GET IF YOU'RE A PLATINUM SUPER SUBSCRIBER! As long as no one imitates MegaUpload's current captchas. Oh lordy are those awful.

Re:Too late

[Toonol]

The more of you who leave, the less unprofitable they will be.

There's a strategy in there somewhere.

Not enough $ per user to cover bandwidth

[tepples]

Imagine a TV show complained about having too many viewers, a radio station about having too many listeners

TV and radio stations pay for bandwidth to reach a geographic area, not per viewer. They pay less per viewer when a higher percentage of viewers are tuned in, and they pay less per viewer in high-population-density areas.

More users = more ad impressions = more revenue, right? Maybe not enough to actually survive, true

As I understand it, this is the case.

but I fail to see how having less users would lead to anything but even greater losses.

The more upstream bandwidth you use, the more you pay.

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.

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.