According to the article, nobody is getting fired. So that's a plus.

By doing that they could pull the plug at any moment.

Thankfully, nobody was fired. Always a good thing.

I was never a huge fan of them anyway. There's been better options for years now.

The "you will have to wait 5 more minutes to download this file... UPGRADE NOW" got pretty old.

I bet if we asked any group of gamers what they thought of this, we'd get a lot more "They were still around?!" responses than rage. Can't expect a company to keep a file site around, and keep paying server costs associated with that, forever.

There was a queuing feature that I found tolerable but still bollocks. I could usually download instantly (no queue), but if a download was popular or had become available recently, it could take ages.

Of course orcishgamer may be referring to some feature that I'm not familiar with. I used Fileplanet so infrequently that I wouldn't be surprised if entire countries had ceased to exist during the time in between.

The queue is what I'm talking about. I didn't know you could get porn on fileplanet. I only ever get game patches there, but having to wait eternity to start downloading them got really old. It didn't help that some companies, like THQ, thought that was an acceptable way to distribute all their patches.

And here I thought it was only us Europeans that had to wait in line to DL files from FP - as a kind of kick in balls from you Americans to us for the privilege of playing your games and now it turns out you had to wait too - Wow, there is justice on the Internet after all!

Yeah, as long as there's an option to decline the autopatch and still be able to play your game (or at least the single player part of it) without any problems or disadvantages (like having to switch to offline mode in Steam).

When I am left unable to play a game I'm enjoying because it suddenly decides it needs a large patch that I have to spend hours if not days (nights, rather) downloading, I wish I had that option. Or when a patch that fixes a few bugs I hadn't even noticed causes the entire game to redownload (as is the case with many Unity-games for instance). Or when a patch breaks important functionality (Skyrim) or makes single player balance changes that I plain don't want.

Fuck man I still have not installed the Iron Wrath expansion on my steam version of Rainbow Six 3 (because my computer's language could not register or something) now where am I going to get the expansion?

On the bright side it represents the demise of another part of the Murdoch empire. On the down side, while there are other download sites, for many things Fileplanet seemed like the only option.

Which only tend to break modifications, and if major unplayable things are found, they are also eventually patched. It is considerably more convenient than manual patching, then again, if one preferred a previous iteration, one is shit out of luck.
See: Dredmor. Game still crashes on me every time I finish a "kill this monster squad" quest. Of course, it is optional but 3 iterations ago, that did not happen! Also, preferred the old crafting system since it allowed one to use the craft tools as extra containers, but eh, whatever.

Fileshack is another option.

First DirectDrive then FilePlanet. What is next?