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."

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:

[mooglez]

MegaUpload's current captchas. Oh lordy are those awful.

On the subject of CAPTCHAs, the one used in gmail is just horrible, I could not get it right and had to resort to the voice option to get past it

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.

Re:

[BikeHelmet]

Don't forget that they have nearly every game demo and patch out there. If you can't find it elsewhere, there's a good chance it's on FileFront.

Some games have lame version to version updaters, requiring a patch_2.x.xx.xxxx_to_2.x.xx.xxx.exe; sometimes those can be a pain to track down, especially if it's an older game and the developer's update servers went down.

I'm glad they're back!

The beauty of the Internet

[mcrbids]

The beauty of the Internet is information does not die! It takes very little work to "bring back up" massive amounts of information and service under a new banner - often just a few days, as has happened here.

Go Internetz!

We have seen article after article criticizing our archiving media. CDs last perhaps a few decades, and the equipment to read magnetic tape backups often doesn't even exist anymore.

Yet, paradoxically, it can be maddeningly difficult to get the Internet to "forget" information once it gets

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:

[flyingfsck]

Funny, I have never even heard of File Front, until now!

Re:

[Smitty025]

It was not actually stupidity, it was timing. Ziff Davis fired the staff and shut down the forums without warning, then added a notice to the main FF site about the closure. The original owners who were, as I understand it, still part of the management of FF decided they would buy it back from Ziff Davis. The problem was that since there was no warning there was no time to arrange a for buying the site before the warning of closure went public.

Re:Too late

[Toonol]

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

There's a strategy in there somewhere.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

And now they have a story on this site. As another poster pointed out he has never heard of FF until now. Reminds me of those "Closing Down Sale"'s that shops have .. then suddenly they are back the next month "miraculously saved", by shadowy founder figures.

Re:

[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

hmm.

[SinShiva]

does this mean less advertising? :[

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.