FilePlanet

» see fileplanet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

fileplanet launched in may 1999 under gamespy industries, mark surfas's company in irvine, california. the initial purpose was practical. quake 2 had a custom-map and mod scene that needed hosting, and the existing options ranged from bad to slower. fileplanet ran the files on a paid cdn and put a search index on top, and over the next decade it became the central download portal for pc game demos, patches, mods and beta keys. the half-life 2 beta keys and the battlefield 1942 demo both moved through here, and the era's release cycle ran through fileplanet's servers.

the queue was the part everybody remembers. free users got slotted into a wait list when a demo dropped, and the wait could be twenty minutes during the popular days. fileplanet plus subscribers, at six dollars a month, jumped the queue and got faster download caps. the business model worked because pc gamers in 2003 had no real alternative. steam existed but barely. bittorrent existed but was not yet how publishers shipped demos.

i used fileplanet around 2003, in the period i was in internet cafes in ankara most days for counter-strike and msn. the cafe machines had whatever drivers and mod files the operator had pulled down, and once in a while that meant standing at the counter waiting for a download to finish because the operator had a fileplanet plus account that the rest of us did not. at home on a 33.6k modem the queue did not matter. the download was the queue.

~ the case file ~

~ the queue ~

the structural argument for the queue was bandwidth. fileplanet served large binaries to a global audience from one set of pipes, and the queue was a polite way of saying the cheap tier had to wait. the real reason was subscription conversion. anyone who tried the free tier during a hot release got a strong nudge to upgrade just to see the file finish that day. the model worked for almost a decade and built one of the larger subscription businesses on the pc gaming web.

~ the long fade ~

steam absorbed the demo and patch problem first, then the mod problem second. by 2008 valve was hosting steam workshop and bigger publishers were pushing demos directly through steam. bittorrent took the rest. fileplanet kept running on momentum, a vintage download portal in a world that no longer needed download portals. ign acquired gamespy in 2004 and then sold gamespy industries to glu mobile in august 2012. in april of that year ign had already announced that fileplanet would be archived. the editorial site finally shut down 21 february 2013 alongside the rest of ign's secondary properties, and the multiplayer infrastructure followed in may 2014.

~ what carried over ~

fileplanet's inheritance is in the muscle memory of a generation of pc gamers who learned that you do not actually own a game's content until the demo and patches and mods are all on your local drive. when steam centralized the patching pipeline and stopped distributing standalone patches, that culture went with it. the games journalism business never replaced what fileplanet was either. there is no central index anymore for the third-party files that make a pc game playable, only nexus mods for the specific games it supports and a long tail of dead links on old forums.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »