FileFront reacquired by original owners, not shutting down
by Alex Ziebart 
Apr 2nd 2009 at 2:00PM
FileFront announced its closure last week, and the gaming community mourned its loss. Mourn no more, however! The original owners of FileFront have reacquired it from Ziff Davis Media, and it will be reopening once more. The notice regarding the reopening states very clearly that this is not an April Fool's joke, nor was the original closure. The timing is suspect, but this absolutely was going to happen without their intervention.I don't know if all of the files have been saved with this change in ownership, but the service will be, at the very least. Will FileFront's founders do a better job keeping the site running? Only time will tell. For now, let's celebrate with all of the other gamers around the world. FileFront is back and hopefully it's here to stay.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
antitux Apr 2nd 2009 2:09PM
Well, I'm glad they're not going away. I've been so underwhelmed by Ziff-Davis in the past few years anyhow. They've been bleeding money since 2001.
MyrddinE Apr 2nd 2009 2:23PM
Now if only they would abandon FTP and switch to Torrent hosting of all files over 10MB. Seriously, this broken clinging to old standards is hurting the legitimacy of better methods.
Torrents were designed to disseminate large files, and they do it extremely well. Why do torrent sites still try to encourage us to pay $10 a month to use an old file transfer method, when they could convince us to pay $2 a month for the same quality of service (because their bandwidth bill would be so dramatically lower).
Sigh.
Thander Apr 2nd 2009 2:37PM
Well I would raise it to 100MB. Big stuff like game demos usually work better with torrents. Small files usually don't work as well. The shorter people are downloading the less people there are helping spread the files. I find that torrents are good for getting current stuff but older stuff that no one is interested in, you can never get a good download. The older stuff is usually under 100MB, so you get a guaranteed connection, maybe only 50kb/s but still better than 3kb/s you get with old torrents.
Dch48 Apr 2nd 2009 4:40PM
I disagree, torrents are never as fast as a direct download. I only use torrents when I can't find things any other way.
Lemons Apr 2nd 2009 3:47PM
Lol...everyone keeps saying "Omg, we're going under! Goodbye forever!" then about a week later they're like "psh...we were jk about all that."
At least it's good publicity for them..
Shadowfire Apr 2nd 2009 3:49PM
There was a big effort of backing up all of the files on all of the mod sites and most if not all got backed up. Someone asked me to help back up some sites so I did. There was a lot of effort put into it.
Devilmachine Apr 2nd 2009 5:29PM
I'm glad Filefront isn't going away. It has always been my preferred download website :)
superstone Apr 2nd 2009 9:10PM
I know that I have no life, because I am overjoyed at hearing this.
I was looking at warcraftmovies.com, and had to find out the hard way that megaupload sucks terrible, terrible things. Things that make God and little children cry.
Thank you Filefront! Thank you for stopping the tears of God (which is what was flooding the Red River.)
AyaJulia Apr 2nd 2009 9:41PM
I'm confused as to just how many parties are involved here.
A) Original owners of Filefront sell FileFront to Ziff-Davis. Ziff-Davis eventually goes under. Original owners can't bear to see their baby shut down and buy it back.
B) Original owners of FileFront form a corporation (or whatever) called Ziff-Davis. Ziff-Davis eventually goes under. Original owners can't bear to see their baby shut down and jump through legal hoops to detach FileFront from Ziff-Davis so it isn't swallowed up in the bankruptcy.
Which is correct? I'm feeling A, but I'm not sure?
GrayElf Apr 3rd 2009 3:05AM
Definitely A. Ziff Davis are a long time (primarily IT?) publishing company, that made a fairly successful move to online publishing - among other things. From memory, PC Magazine and Mac User were some of their more well known publications. You can find them at zdnet.com.
I used to work for the local (Sydney, Australia) publishing company that had licensed the ZD franchises, many years ago. They didn't have an Australian branch of ZD at the time, but did start one up later (primarily for exhibitions, I believe, rather than publishing - but I wasn't really involved, and never kept track).
I'm sure Wikipedia would have more details on the history of both Filefront, and Ziff Davis.
Ella Apr 3rd 2009 12:16AM
I'm glad that they're not shutting down! They were my preferred site as well. Yay!
Ozain Apr 4th 2009 11:38AM
Only one thing I can say here....
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY