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Companies Offer AAA Games For 'Free'

Posted by Zonk on Tue Sep 04, 2007 03:57 PM
from the depends-on-your-definition-of-free dept.
Entertainment Games
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.
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Companies Offer AAA Games For 'Free' 25 Comments More /

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  • to subscribers only.
  • 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.

  • 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
  • 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 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Enderandrew (866215) <enderandrew@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Tuesday September 04 2007, @04:16PM (#20469041) Homepage Journal
    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.
      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by MikeFM (12491)
          I just stopped playing those games anyway. None of them was really any fun and I got sick of seeing real life friends refusing to go do real life things because they had to camp and wait (for hours!) for the magic penis stretcher to reappear so they could continue on their quest.

          Still, I think they should just roll the development costs into what is covered by subscriptions. I'd be more likely to try more of the games if I could do it without having to buy anything.
        • Blizzard would HAPPILY give out a copy of World of Warcraft free to anyone who asks, if it were a good economic decision for them. Its not (or rather, was not at launch and will not be at the launch of each expansion pack for a few years yet). In the US, good high speed bandwidth is rare, and WoW is huge. The most efficient form of distributing untold terabytes of textures across the Internets is to not use the Internet at all, but rather to burn it on CDs, put the CDs in warehouses, and move from wareho

  • Boo ads (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cervantes (612861) on Tuesday September 04 2007, @04:17PM (#20469069) Journal
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

      by QMalcolm (1094433) on Tuesday September 04 2007, @04:34PM (#20469297)
      'Guitar Hero' with strings would end up just being 'Guitar', I reckon.

    • Re:Boo ads (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Canthros (5769) on Tuesday September 04 2007, @04:34PM (#20469303)
      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?

    • 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.

      Activision gave away the original Zork trilogy as a way to help promote one of their graphical Zork adventures about a decade ago.

      Sierra used to do this very occasionally. They gave away "Betrayal at

  • An excellent policy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Puff of Logic (895805) on Tuesday September 04 2007, @04:18PM (#20469083)
    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.
    • Huh? I remember hearing a while ago that Freespace 2 was released as freeware. A quick glance at its Wikipedia entry also shows that its source code was made available. In fact, a Google search [google.com] will list a number of freeware web sites that have links to the game.

      In short, you've been missing out all this time. :)

      But don't expect the Wing Commander series to be released as freeware any time soon. It's own by EA now. :(

  • It's a game-flavored ad (Score:4, Informative)

    by Fry-kun (619632) on Tuesday September 04 2007, @04:25PM (#20469193)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by ASkGNet (695262) on Tuesday September 04 2007, @04:44PM (#20469433) Homepage
      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 (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Fry-kun (619632) on Tuesday September 04 2007, @05:33PM (#20470247)

        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.

  • Yeah, but which AAA games? (Score:3, Funny)

    by RoverDaddy (869116) on Tuesday September 04 2007, @09:14PM (#20472965) Homepage
    Did they release any of my favorites, like TripTik Hunter IV, Roadside Assist - The Awakening, or Extreme Traveler's Check Speed Signing?
    • 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

    • 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.

    • 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

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