-= Gametoast.com =-

http://www.moddb.com/news/we-have-acquired-gamefront

DBolical, the company behind ModDB and IndieDB, has acquired the gamefront.com domain from Defy Media (last owner of the company after it was sold by Break Media, I guess) and relaunched the site with a new design.
Files are back online, as well as the feature to upload them. I don't think there is any will the revive the "organised" websites though (e.g SWBFFiles).

http://www.gamefront.com/

While I don't really like the design (I'm still in love with early 2000s layouts!), this is at least an "official" take at reviving Gamefront. To clear things up again, Gamefront.online was merely a backup maintained online by Russian game servers company DS-Servers, and although their initiative was of a huge help, there was no evidence it would stay online forever. (My thought is that the cost of running such a large website while having no direct revenue from it might have dissuaded DS-Servers from keeping the site alive for long.)

I was never really a fan of Gamefront, but it's nice from a file hosting standpoint. I was a much bigger fan of their respective subsites like SWBFFiles. I doubt those will come back, though.

Still, couldn't think of a better company to buy up Gamefront.

Maybe if enough demand by the community to bring back SWBFFiles (and perhaps other, similar ones), Mod DB will have to bring them back. And they did say in Step 3: "is ultimately up to you", meaning the community can have an effect on what happens with the site.

Teancum wrote:I was a much bigger fan of their respective subsites like SWBFFiles. I doubt those will come back, though.

They did. To some extend. At least their file content it appears, including metadata and somewhat organized.

I created a thread for that yesterday, being all excited about the GameFront relaunch. Then I remembered that GameFront being back was older news already and found this thread again. I deleted my thread.

But the reason for my confusion is understandable. Since about three weeks or so GameFront now includes original content from the FileFront network sites, including SWBFFiles. They also changed their layout to something you can actually use.

Specifically this means each game's section at GameFront now displays the categories that were displayed on SWBFFiles with (apparently currently only some) of the files listed there. Each file's entry contains most of the old metadata, i.e. the description that often contained a staff-written review, the readme file, even the screenshots and also metadata like downloads and upload date. Developer/author/uploader information is also present, with an overview of all the files of a developer.

As an example, here is the Conversion Pack 2.0 on GameFront with the original screenshots and uploader information.

It appears to be that not all the files are back, though, however they stated that it will still take a while to get all the files up. Especially files that were hosted on GameFront-only aren't there yet. These are of course the majority, or at least a significant portion, since SWBFFiles existed still for quite a while after stopping hosting files themselves and only redirecting to GameFront.
It appears that the file listing only displays some of the files (possibly the ones that were originally hosted on SWBFFiles). However apparently all of the files are back, as was apparently the case since late 2016 already.

Still, I think that's a great thing. Even though there is the mirror of GameFront, it is quite a mess regarding metadata and browsing the archived pages of SWBFFiles is a pain in the backside. If all the files are coming back to the new GameFront and word spreads around the internet, maybe eventually demand for mods and maps increases, causing the modding community to flourish again. (Not that it's entirely down, but it's best days are certainly over.)

EDIT: Old SWBFFiles links (starwarsbattlefront.filefront.com/...) work again, too. This is pretty neat... all those links lying around everywhere in the internet that were dead, are now working again.