UPDATE: So that no one misses this news I have bumped it to the top. THANKS GREATLY to our community for uploading some mods. Please continue to do so. We continue to try and get in touch with Defy Media (GF owners), but no luck so far.
It has just been announced that long running gaming hub GameFront will be closing it's doors on April 30th. The Mod DB team would like to sincerely thank the GameFront crew for doing an outstanding job supporting modding and helping host the public's creations over 20 years.
We are very worried that many amazing mods and addons shared only on Gamefront will be lost in 2 weeks time after the closure. So we are calling on our entire community to help us preserve these files and make them available forever. If you have downloaded a mod, addon or know of files on GameFront that are not currently hosted on Mod DB, please share them. You can submit content to Mod DB via the following links:
After April 30th no files will be able to be recovered so if you have files or know of others that do please spread the word, so we can all do our bit in making sure all mods are added to the archives and not the history books. Finally Mod DB would like to wish the team at GameFront the very best with their future endeavors and once again thank them for their contribution to the modding community.
Thanks for helping us preserve modding history
A few people have asked where to submit files. To help answer that: it really depends on the project. If it has a trailer, multiple images or news you should make a mod profile www.moddb.com/mods/add and submit the file to the mod profile. If it is just an individual file (map, model etc) with not many details, a download will do: www.moddb.com/downloads/add (just make sure you pick the right category for the file (map, model etc) and our system will automatically determine if it is an addon or not)
2009 all over again
GameFront shut down before?
They stopped updating the site but kept it online (so downloads still worked). This time they are going dark.
"so downloads still worked"
^ yeah right, but they're restricted their service to other countries that they might think unprofitable (through ads).
It's their own fault anyway, so no hard feelings here...
Totally agree with you. GameFront pretty much doomed itself
In a way I feel sad because I would have hoped that they removed their idiotic country ban.
Also there was some rare patches for quite forgotten games in there.
I thought Moddb used Gamefront? (maybe it's my memory that's corrupted?) What does it mean for any mods we have uploaded to Moddb? Are these all safe? I don't want a repeat of when the FBI jumped on the site I used before coming here, I forget its name Megaupload I think.
We used them as a mirror because bandwidth is expensive but rest assured we have a copy of everything submitted to the site and all are available and will remain that way
Sorry for question. Will mods that were added on Mod DB, but with download links on GameFront, be still available, or it's needed to re-upload them (or something)?
No they are all safe, no need to to re-add anything submitted to ModDB. But anything directly submitted to Gamefront only and not ModDB should be added
That's good too know thanks, I keep 2 sets of back-ups on external drives so it's safe as I lost a lot of translated Russian mods last time but this sites a great place to make them available to others so I hope you continue to thrive and prosper too..
Thanks guys, this is why Moddb is the best modding site :D
Not exactly, an archive library by the name of Wayback Machine still has the downloadable files on gamefront if you go far back enough.
Escapistmagazine.com
Almost did. If I remember correctly the original owners bought it back from whomever was running it at the time to keep it online
That's very sad I think all the "classic" download sites pretty much went down now Gamefront was the latest of them and the fact they baned many countries pretty much impeded many users to use it correctly ...
I mean there was File Planet even if it wasn't great because of the wait ...
There was also AtomicGamer, Fileshack. Sites dedicated for mods towards few games, sites dedicated to one game series and its mods, etc ...
This is a shame because some content weren't available in all the websites so sometimes there was some downloads who were only available in one of these sites.
Many modders dedicated their time onto stuff and seeing how it's treated I think it's shame ...
Well at least I trusted the right one.
Farewell.
Related articles on Gamefront...
Warning signs in 2015: Gamefront.com
The announcement: Gamefront.com
Filefront forums will also close (probably): Forums.gamefront.com
OMG... This is a very sad day! GameFront has always been a very nice website and very easy to use. Thanks for all of your good work GameFront, I hope you'll come back again someday.
That's sad p(´⌒`。q)
R.I.P.
What a shame, really :(
Well f*ck.
RIP Gamefront. :(
Dammit! I need to buy some external HDD to save some of those mods (especially Battlefield ones).
We encourage you to begin submitting them here. Need to retain them we are trying to reach out to game front now to see what we can do
I don't know if I can upload them if I didn't have a permission from the mod team. Then I don't know how should I upload it. If I make a mod page or try to contact some of those people. Furthermore, I don't want to get a ban. If you (as a head admin) allow me to upload them here I will definitely upload them, but it will be sometime in the future. I have a huge respect for those modders so I don't know if I can just upload it without permission.
Luckily, there are not so many of them (if we talk about the normal mods and not just copy and paste which are mostly broken anyways), but there is a one big problem which is my upload speed. Of course that first I need to test them.
You will not be banned and if the original creator wants to take control of the mod profile or have it removed we will do that for them. It is how we always operate when mirroring content and ensuring it has a home. Creators come first.
That's great to read. I have no problem if they want to take control of that, but I hope that they will don't want to remove them. It takes me about an hour to upload 500 MB file. Some mods have over 2GB so it could take four hours straight. When I find some of those mod makers here I will try to get permission to upload it directly to their mod page (I think tat one or two mods has it, but in some cases I prefer the older version much more than the new one).
Thanks for helping out, you might be able to extract the raw url from gamefront and upload using the "url" function on our site which makes it much faster.
That's OK. I can upload it separately, which will be much better. I have already all the Battlefield Mods and also, Far Cry 1 Mods which aren't here. The best Far Cry 1 Mods used to be on Crymods but some time ago most of them has been uploaded here.
Only a few things need to be done and the most important is to check all of those mods, what they do, sort them together and choose right category for them, because they have mostly chosen a wrong name.
Brilliant :)
Hey Intense! I'd suggest taking a look at the filefront forums again and try and get in contact with FileTrekker, he's currently working on a site to replace Filefront/Gamefront and help is always good. It's 100% a community effort and stuff.
Additionally, his twitter tag is Twitter.com not gametrekker
i'll see what he says
First GameTrailers, Now Gamefront?
And filefront. There are going to be only few mod sites now.
Gamefront is Filefront just so you know, we were rebranded when Break/Defy Media acquired us after Ziff media dropped us.
uhh the filefront sites are already rip (like the individual ones for each franchise, like mohfiles codfiles etc)
You can still get on filefront if you use the internet archive :), only their are some things broken like downloading files. It doesn't link to the gamefront download page correctly. :(
(for example: Web.archive.org )
Hi, I'm a member of a group called the ArchiveTeam which archives websites that are about to close. We actually put GameFront on our deathwatch list last year after they stopped posting news updates. Late last year we scraped the files they were hosting and every file that we've saved (which should be the vast majority of them) is available through the Internet Archive WayBack Machine (for example: Web.archive.org). That's not to say that you shouldn't make your own archives of content you care about (you definitely should!) but rest assured that there is a backup if all else fails.
Wow you backup the files as well. I had no idea archive.org does that. Doesn't Gamefront have like 30TB+ of files hosted?
The Internet Archive's normal scraping doesn't usually dig that deeply into sites but this was a special scrape specifically to grab GameFront-hosted files. To clarify, the ArchiveTeam is not officially associated with the Internet Archive though our aims are similar and the IA is nice enough to host our data dumps (you can grab the raw archive files here: Archive.org) and even incorporate them into the WayBack Machine. You can view the progress we've made on the GameFront grab here Tracker.archiveteam.org (and yes, we have grabbed over 28 TB of data from them).
This is great! Can I ask how you guys got past the "thank you" gateway? Some of us filefront guys have been beating our heads on this for the last couple days trying to get actual download links programmatically and having no luck.
Alternatively, is there some way to get a raw file list from the Archive copy instead of going through the Gamefront page?
I'm not sure about the technical details of this project. You can view the code we use on GitHub (https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/gamefront-grab) and you can ask our main project programmer arkiver on our IRC channel #archiveteam on EFNet.
Any contact to them?
Attempting that now
Wait. I found their admin's twitter. @TheGameTrekker
Have you contact him?
i've been trying! no luck thus far
Rest in peace, FileLeech/FileFront/GameFront.
You will be missed.
RIP faithful file-hoster.
And what will happen when ModDB will go down?
People have no concept of conservation these days.
That's why most people still use Microsoft's Windows I guess.
We run a really small, conservative business, we don't have a large owner that wants profits or we close
Don't you even dare to joke with that!