Free games -- Sierra crazy?

Sierra has an interesting strategy. They've decided to release old games for free to promote new titles. Recently they released Tribes and Tribes 2 for free. Just a few days ago they released the original Ground Control to promote its recently released sequel.

Interestingly enough, as of writing this Fileplanet says "NOTE: No Keys are available for Tribes 2. Check back at a later time to see if the Free version of Tribes 2 becomes available." Quite odd, since I downloaded it today and was just playing it a few minutes ago. After downloading the exe from a site I found on Google, and then following this direct link on Fileplanet to receive my CD Key, I was able to play it. I did have to jump through a couple hoops to get to that point, but provided you've signed up for Fileplanet (yuk) already, you shouldn't have to.

I do not intend on downloading Ground Control for free as I have played this game in the past and have plenty of other things to keep me busy for now.

The question is, will releasing these games for free actually help sells of the new Tribes and Ground Control games? The truth is, compared to new games such as Unreal Tournament 2004, neither Tribes nor Tribes 2 are that exciting. Even Tribes 2 is dated considering it was released in 2001. The graphics definitely do not stand up to Unreal Tournament 2004 nor does the gameplay. Obviously, the new Tribes game, Tribes: Vengeance, is meant to be a competitor to Unreal Tournament. While the original Tribes was a cult hit, many eye-candy lusting gamers today may simply be turned off by it.

On the other hand, I applaud Sierra's choice (or whoever choose) to release these classic games. Other companies such as iD have taken a different route choosing to release the full source code of their older games for caffeine-saturated programmers. This has allowed us to play such amazing things as 3D-accelerated Doom.

I sure hope Gamespy is paying Sierra a lot of money to make these is a semi-exclusive release to Fileplanet. Quite a few gamers (myself included) despise Fileplanet's over-bloated interface. It used to be you could simply connect to an FTP server and download what you wanted. For Fileplanet you have to sign up for an account, attempt to find the file you are looking for with their absolutely atrociously bad search feature, click about 5 times, wait "in line" for a free download space for anywhere for 3 minutes to an hour -- all while keeping an eye on it to make sure you don't miss your spot, and then finally click another button for the download to start. For game companies that want to make the next big hit, Fileplanet is *not* the way to go.

Am I looking forward to Tribes: Vengeance? Not really. Have the free releases of Tribes and Tribes 2 done anything for me? No. After all the pain I went to get these two games from Fileplanet for free it wasn't worth it. I think I spent more time finding the files, downloading them, and signing up for a Fileplanet account then I did actually playing the games.