Fare Thee Well 3DFiles

My usual trawl of the web this morning brought a nasty shock. Just when everyone thought the wave of ‘we don’t have any advertising money’ website shutdowns were over, comes the impending death of one of the long running file sites. As it celebrates

My usual trawl of the web this morning brought a nasty shock. Just when everyone thought the wave of 'we don't have any advertising money' website shutdowns were over, comes the impending death of one of the long running file sites. As it celebrates its fourth birthday on the 14th September, 3Dfiles will close.

That leaves the gaming community without what has constantly been one of the best, and fastest, demo download sites. Ever since the days when it was called 3dfxmania there has been a steady trickle of daily demos and other cool stuff emanating from the page.

We are now left with sites like fileplanet, which now requires registration and login before downloading, and a monetary contribution if you wish to avoid the 40 minute queues that now characterise the site.

With the close of 3Dfiles and the cessation of downloads at sites like 3dchipset it seems as though we are bearing witness to the next series of website monetary woes. The advertising bust may be well and truly over, but obviously the next big money saving measure is a reduction in the costs associated with maintaining and serving large file archives.

It will be interesting to see how this develops, and what sites will follow 3dfiles down the path to oblivion. But what is more important is the wait for another site to rise and take the place as the download site that must be checked on a daily basis. For now I would heartily suggest that everyone makes the most of 3dfiles while it is still around, especially with the Saturday (local time) release of the long awaited Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer test demo.

- John Gillooly