Ok, couple pieces of information you guys need in order to have a bit of a reality check:
1. The number of downloads listed on FilePlanet is around 50,000. This is great, except the number ticks up every time someone STARTS a download, not when they finish it. The actual number of finished downloads is about 15% of those who start it. Still, even 7,500 people getting through a 600MB download is pretty good.
2. We told FilePlanet to only distribute 5,000 CD-keys in order to limit the possibility that the Tribes 2 account generation server would explode. I'm not a tech guy, but the way our IT folks were talking made it sound like it was completely possible that a huge influx of new Tribes 2 players all at the same time would warp the space-time continuum, cause global warming, kill my cat, and sleep with my girlfriend. Seriously, they said it could be bad and that it could crash the server, and since nobody around here knows the voodoo science necessary to get the server up and running again, we decided that it would be best to simply limit the number of keys distributed.
This is probably the cause of a lot of the delays in people getting their keys from FilePlanet. It was actually quite smart of them to make it hard to get the keys given so many people start but never complete the download. Why should we hand out 50,000 keys when 90% of them will never need it?
We need to look at how our servers are holding up to the relative onslaught of new accounts and determine if we can give FilePlanet the OK to distribute more CD-keys. Given that E3 is in a couple days, however, it's possible that our guys are a little distracted with more important things - things that actually make us money.
So, in the end this was a lot of hassle for us. Yes, we did it to hype Tribes: Vengeance, but anyone who suggests that that was the only reason doesn't know us. It simply would not have been worth all of the trouble and internal political crap that Thrax and I had to go through in order to push this through for an incremental Tribes: Vengeance publicity hit. Giving away Tribes and Tribes 2 makes sense for us as a company and it was a great experiment. I consider it a success and it's possible, even likely, that you'll see us do the same thing with other games in the near future.
Everything did not go according to plan, but nothing crashed and burned, either. Giving away a 600MB game that requires a CD-key to play is not easy, let me assure you.