Companies Offer AAA Games For 'Free'

Both Ubisoft and EA are offering up free games to cash-conscious gamers this week. For the low, low cost of nothing you can play titles like Command and Conquer Gold, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and Far Cry. The catch? Well, EA's offering is totally gratis; 1995's C&C Gold is a gift to gamers for supporting the series for all these years. The Ubisoft games, though, are only "free". They're available from Fileplanet in ad-supported format.

Free...

to subscribers only.

Re:Free...

No, last I checked any fileplanet registration was enough to d/l these. I.e. the free registration, the one where most ppl make up thier login info?

Sort of like Valve?

So, you take an old game that still has some interest, ad adds, then release it for free? Thats kind of like what Valve did for Counterstrike, only they forgot the 'free' part. They certainly nailed the ads though, both in game on walls and on the scoreboard.

For Posterity

These companies are finally allowing people to play these great, (some) historic games without the legal ambiguities of abandonware hanging around their neck. For us old farts and the occasional curious young gamer, being able to play C&C95 at any time is not only a great marketing tool for EA, but it is an important piece of gaming history that is now freely available. GJ to EA (for once) and Ubisoft. Oh, and not to snub Prince of Persia: I love PoP:SoT, which has a significant place in the history of platformers, and hope that it will eventually be phased to freeware (I understand the ads for now, due to bandwidth costs).

Alternate links

Alternate links, including one for Ghost Recon can be found here: http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?thread id=597322 [slickdeals.net]

Kudos for them

Honestly, this is such a win-win, I don't know who companies don't do it more. You're not going to get significant revenue still selling these old titles, yet companies go after people for sharing 20 year old abandonware titles for some crazy reason.

When EA gives a game like this away for free, they get good PR, and they possibly create a new audience to suddenly look at the sequels to these games if perhaps they might not have otherwise.

Re:Games with subscriptions should be free.

The game has a heavy development cost, actually moreso than a standard game. When you buy the retail box, you are paying the developers for the initial cost of devlopment. The servers and bandwidth also cost money, and developers are expected to constantly squash bugs, and release new content to keep you playing, thus the subscription price.

If you don't like it, check out something like Guild Wars (more of a slimmed down title, but cheaper) or Planeshift, which is free last time I checked.

Boo ads

Take a game that's already made it's money back, and probably sells all of 2 copies a month, but hey, let's make some more money from it! Always with the string attached. Dang money-grubbing companies. *sigh* I tell ya, as far as I can recall, there hasn't been a game released without strings since Guitar Hero.

Re:Boo ads

'Guitar Hero' with strings would end up just being 'Guitar', I reckon.

Re:Boo ads

You're right. They totally remove the ads, and make it available for $$ or not at all.

Honestly. You guys are a bunch of whiney, ungrateful jerks. The Ubisoft games aren't even that old--the Prince of Persia title's from 2003 and FarCry's from 2004, which puts them both in the $20 budget bin. And Rayman Raving Rabbids (which is conspicuously absent from the summary above) isn't even a year old. Seriously, what do you want for nothing?

Re:Boo ads

Joke:   ->
You:     O
        /|\
        / \

An excellent policy

I can actually get behind this policy. While I have a problem with advertisements in games for which I've paid full price, I have absolutely no problem putting up with reasonably placed McDonald's interstitial ads or menu banners if I know it's allowing me to play the game for free. An ad-supported, digitally-distributed model for older games is a recipe for success in my book and I'd support the model enthusiastically. I don't want to see it become the primary model for games, as I'm quite happy to shell out full price for a quality game with no advertisements at all. However, if someone were to make Freespace 2 (or hell, even the old Wing Commander games) available with this model, I'd sign up immediately.

It's a game-flavored ad

I've downloaded Rayman Raving Rabids to check it out. There's just one ad - a pretty bad macdonalds one.
You get the ad:
1. When the game starts,
2. Before every level,
3. After every level

This means if you play 3x 30-second levels you get 6x 30-second ad.
I guess they looked at how the TV ads have been progressing in few past few years, added a quick spell of reductio ad absurdum [wikipedia.org] and crapped out the result.

Funny part is, I might've actually kept the game if there were some variety to ads and/or they showed up in longer intervals - at least 5 minutes or so..

P.S. for some reason they make you link the game to your ubi.com account...

Re:It's a game-flavored ad

The ads are laughable. All of the advertising is done by DFHEngine.dll, which hooks D3D9 renderer to do its bidding.
The main game executable has a call at the very beginning to DFHInitialize. Removing that removes all the ads.

Enjoy.

Re:It's a game-flavored ad

The ads are laughable. All of the advertising is done by DFHEngine.dll, which hooks D3D9 renderer to do its bidding.
The main game executable has a call at the very beginning to DFHInitialize. Removing that removes all the ads.

Enjoy.

Be that as it may, it negates the whole point of ad-supported games. If I were going to do what you suggest, I might as well just get a warez copy of the game in the first place. Not only would I not have to register and perform any extra steps post-install, I'd also get to use a torrent with great download speed (as opposed to waiting for an hour or two in the "download queue").

I'm not against ad-supported games - in fact I think it's a great idea, especially for low-income gamers. I have a problem with this particular execution, though.

EA?

This was extremely cool of EA. It was a labor day weekend full of nostalgia.

Any of them work with WINE?

The app datbase at winehq says that this version of Far Cry does not work. I'm not sure about the others. Anyone else test them? The retail version of these game do work in Wine, but I'm not sure about getting this modified version to run.
 

hmm...

"you must live in the U.S. to play the game"

why the european people never get the good things? :\

Yeah, but which AAA games?

Did they release any of my favorites, like TripTik Hunter IV, Roadside Assist - The Awakening, or Extreme Traveler's Check Speed Signing?

AAA = Triple-A?

AAA = Triple-A?

http://triplea.sourceforge.net/mywiki [sourceforge.net]

Anyway, that's what I thought when I saw the headline...

Another Ad-Supported Ubisoft Game

There is another ad-supported Ubisoft game called Shadowbane [ubi.com]. It is an old MMORPG, but apart from an ad that displays every time you start up the game, is otherwise completely free to play (installer is free, and the online subscription is free). The installer for this one however, can also be downloaded from BitTorrent [ubi.com]. Very interesting way to find revenue for games that have become unfashionable, but are still viable in a Long Tail kind of way.

Getting C&C 95 is like...

getting a gift pufferfish to eat from China. Dont accidentally install Direct X 3.0 , or adobe, or... Also it doesn't appear to work with XP Service Pack 2. I had to crank out my old laptop to play it. On my newer computer, it kept freezing anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes into the game even after fiddling with all the settings and compatability.

Testing ads?

Well, to me it looks as if these chaps are testing advertisements in games (yes, I know some games already have these) to see how people respond, and how much they don't mind.
A good idea placing them in free games (meaning, you can't expect to sell any more of them, so you might as well give them away and get a good name for this) as an experiment.

However... I personally find advertisements disgusting. They're the primary reason I don't own a TV (that, and the rather moronic content). Same reason I don't listen to the radio. Hardly go to movie theaters (sometimes, on a particularly good film, I go if I can find out when the actual movie starts).
Thus I, personally, have no interest in these games.

Meaning, if this turns out to be successful, I'm worried that we might see more ads in the games we buy. Which would mean that I buy less games than I do now...

Requires installing an ActiveX control?

I tried downloading the file and got a message that it couldn't install a download control.

Well, yeh, I don't use Internet Explorer for browsing the web precisely because I don't want sites installing ActiveX controls on me.

No, I'm not going to fire up IE for Fileplanet, even if I do trust them to download a program from them and install it, unl;ess they can vouch for all of their advertisers and anyone else who can inject HTML into their pages. Not just for the sake of running a bleeding game.

Link the link, not the bloody blog

I hate it when people do that, I wish there were editors to catch it.... sigh.

The link to the C&C page that actually gives you the files (C&C GDI, C&C Nod, and XP install instructions) http://www.commandandconquer.com/intel/default.asp x?id=61#NewsMain [commandandconquer.com]

Rayman Raving Rabbids 11 meg
http://www.fileplanet.com/180428/180000/fileinfo/R ayman-Raving-Rabbids-%5BFree-Game---Ad-Supported%5 D [fileplanet.com]

Prince of Persia Sands of Time: 1200 megs http://www.fileplanet.com/180411/180000/fileinfo/P rince-of-Persia:-Sands-of-Time-Full-Game-%5BFree-G ame---Ad-Supported%5D [fileplanet.com]

Far Cry: 2.7 gigs (!)
http://www.fileplanet.com/180410/180000/fileinfo/F ar-Cry-Full-Game-%5BFree-Game---Ad-Supported%5D [fileplanet.com]

Ubi games - Not free anymore!

I downloaded Far Cry (2.6GB) from Fileplanet when this story first appeared on Slashdot. Didn't have time to install or play, so I let it sit. Finally went to install and play last night (9/7/07).

When I went to install, I was informed that I had to provide ubi.com logon credentials. Fine, that seems fair. So I registered a new account at ubi.com, provided the credentials and it *still* wouldn't allow me to install the game. Said I had to live in the US to enjoy the offer. Um... well I do live in the US. I figured maybe my account needed to steep a bit before I could sign up. *shrug*

Found this letter from Ubi.com in my inbox this morning:

"Thank you for downloading one of the promotional PC titles made available for ad-supported freeplay over the Labor Day weekend. The promotion is now closed and it is no longer possible to play the games for free.

If you are interested in further information on these titles, please visit our official website at www.ubi.com"

Nice! I guess "free, ad-supported" only means "free, ad-supported for three days!"

What a shame. I love the idea of playing older games in an ad-supported format. I really love it when classic games are given back to the fans at the end of their lifecycle. Example: Arena (TES 1) from Bethesda Softworks, Zork Trilogy from Infocom (now Activision), and now C&C from Westwood. I paid $40 or more for each of those games when they were first released (I'm 38 now), now they're long gone from my collection but it is a great feelgood to play them again. There is a huge positive karma effect for these companies to give it up this way.

Oh well, at least C&C is still working. :-)

Re:First...

Curse my lust for first postage. from tfa

We are providing the original Command & Conquer Gold as a free download, compatible for Windows XP!

Internet: Lots
Me: -1

According to TFA, yes...

Apparently, if you burn the iso to a disc, and then follow these steps [ea.com][.DOC warning], it works. I haven't verified this though.

Re:First...

C&C Gold runs on XP; the instructions for patching it to run on XP are included on the download page. Apparently, the IPX networking code on the CDs doesn't work on XP, so they provide a patch that removes the offending code entirely. The other net play options (including TCP/IP) seem to be unaffected, although I haven't verified this myself (don't have XP on this machine, so I can't test this right now).

You may also experience problems with the default screen resolution of 640x400 (graphics driver lock-ups on start in my case); use the supplied configuration program to change it to a more compatible 640x480 (and fiddle with vertical size on your monitor to fix the aspect ratio if you need to).

Re:First...

I would think this version is one that does; I bought the 10 year aniversary pack which included everything from C&C to Generals (+ all exansions at the time) and they did update to work on XP.

Some years before though I bought something similar, but it was not updated.. needless to say I was not happy.

Re:Rockstar

Jeezus pleezus but you pigs are ungrateful. Just don't download it then.

Re:Rockstar

Why couldn't they have followed Rockstar's lead and just released the damn game without any strings?

It sure as hell would have simplified localization!

Re:All that is nice, but...

Does anything?

(Yeah, flag me as a troll... I don't care. It was a joke, and I am an Ubuntu user. Now the question is, will anyone with mod points actually READ this far. If so, please mod it as interesting. Consider it a social experiment to see if anyone reads beyond the opening comment without bothering to see the context.)

Re:Annoying!!!

You can get the Ubisoft games from Gamer's Hell [gamershell.com] or FileShack [fileshack.com] too.