I don't think free games were given away on PC magazines cover discs that much in the UK. The bulk of it was demos,mods,patches utility programs and so on. PCFormat had full versions of programs frequently with everything else. This helped a lot in a time when broadband wasn't widely available. The removal of cover discs were a great loss to the PC.

Here is a small and large cover disc picture from 20 years ago.........

https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/273807713871_/PC-Format-Cover-DVDs-Issues-125-127-134-142.jpg
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/vsoAAOSwgmJXzFix/s-l1600.jpg

They were normal cover models.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/magazinesfromthepast/images/d/d5/PC_Format_Issue_116.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20200409173149

I'm just looking through some of the other stuff I've got here, stuff I'd have no idea even exists otherwise...

Original War - apparently something like Red Alert with time travel to prehistoric times? Here on GOG it has great reviews. If I didn't suck so much at RTSes I might actually check it out.

Vivisector - an FPS hybrid (pun intended) of dr Moreau and Far Cry? Made with something like a 1/10 of the budget and know-how of FarCry? Hmmm.

Marine Heavy Gunner Vietnam - a really bad, cheap, ugly, FPS. Actually it looks so craptastic it might almost be worth playing for shits and giggles.

Daemonica - some sort of adventure game - RPG hybrid? Actually doesn't look too bad for 2005, and a supernatural detective story in medieval England sounds kinda cool.

Back then I got CDs with 9000+ games and demos from some random newspaper store that someone bought me. I remember playing them a lot. Many were demos, others complete games and many others secret alpha demos.

Among many other games that I wouldn't be able to remember, two, in special, comes to mind:

Silver Knights

A demo of an mecha third person shooter/melee fighting game with many robots to choose from and a "boss" (Joker, was his name, and he was bigger than common mechas, with a lot more of hp). This game was (and still is imho) one of the best third person mecha games.

Later, while searching for this game, I discovered that it's creator gave up on it's development, and some members of the community were still making mods for the game. They also managed to make it work in a multiplayer mode.

Also found it's installer in Internet Archive. Sadly, most recent versions don't work in Windows 10 (They may in Linux though), while older versions do work in Windows XP-Windows10 suprisingly!

https://archive.org/details/SKVer0.05D

You can try playing it if you will. It's really fun, even today, I think. I played it this year and had good hours of fun of nostalgia.
There are many older and newer versions out there, but, because it's developer were Japanese, you may find it's versions in Japanese sites.

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Ultimate Knight Windom XP

This game is not really old, but I remember playing a pre-pre-alpha-demo of this game in one of those 9000+ games CDs I had back then.

Same as above, but with a more refined gameplay, this game still have players today with the mod I linked below.

https://www.moddb.com/games/ultimate-knight-windom-xp

https://www.moddb.com/mods/exvs2/news/gundam-versus-mod-14

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Sorry if I focused more in both games than in my history with them, still, hope someone may find those findings fun. :)

There's one more game, a 2D platformer, where you played as some kind of small blue jelly ball, an experiment, escaped from a laboratory. You were able to attack throwing one pill or something. This game was really fun. But I can't remember the name, sadly.

I've heard of this before, it does look kind of interesting. Although I did confuse it with Ecstatica before. Those are weird old titles I probably saw reviews or demos of in the 90s. Never really knew what kind of games they were. But I would be inclined to buy all three of them, if they came to GOG, Ecstatica 1+2 and Daemonica (and then probably never play them afterwards :D).

Here's Issue 206 with which I rest my case. Several other covers from that time period were similar, but not available on that site - or anywhere else I could find.

This is the magazine of my youth

I got a magazine just for the Daggerfall demo, don't remember the mag name. it stoked my hype up for the full release. Lost them decades ago.

Yep, I was certainly influenced to buy a magazine if it contained some game or related that I was interested in. Often it could be a Tomb Raider demo for me, or Quake Levels or detailed walkthrus etc. I certainly did not buy every issue.

Very good conversation topic and many things were told.
I still have some of the CD/DVD that contained the cover game, many were loaned to others and lost in the process.
I did not buy these magazines regularly, only when the game was interesting, but there were lots of gems during the years like NOLF 1-2, Jagged Alliance 2, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, MDK 2, Homeworld 1-2.
There were also "niche" gems that I personally liked, for example The Sting, Armies of Exigo, Silver or Evolva. And there were not so good ones for my liking: Thandor the Invasion, Kingdom under fire or Siege of avalon.

I think the game was the main selling point for many gamers, as this was a good source for getting new games apart from knowing someone who could distribute copied games.
Later the magazines either ceased, but surprisingly the last two held out until the end of 2019, although in the last several years they provided the games as Steam codes.

Thinking about the list of games I am not so sure about the legal aspect of some of the games. NOLF 1-2 is in a legal limbo as confirmed in other forum topics, so how can someone sell it if he does not know the proper owner? Similarly I heard rumors that the Warcraft II was not the fully official Blizzard version, and the bugs of the cracked version appeared in the gaming magazine version too.

Nonetheless the games were worth the price of the magazine.

Ahaha, same man!

Know I read RetroGamer and E1M1 Magazine...though the latter I am biased towards given it's FPS focused and I write for them...but still COOL PICTURES!

It was best source of legit full game, back then when video games counted as luxury goods for adult folks with jobs.

Some notable titles got into my hands that are nowhere to be found in digital stores due to various reasons - copyright mess, multiple owners (at least one of them against the idea of selling it again) or just people hating videogames in general (I'm looking at you, Herberts).

Got some Tony Hawk's games, racing games that are not sold anymore due to licence (music is also another reason why some games are not available these days), Heretic 2... even if some of them reach digital stores they might be missing some language (like Polish), for some reasons it's not there, either locat owner are no-go or outside publishers got their hands on them, weirdly enough...

These days only CD - Action is still alive, they survived solely thanks to full games, other magazines got way better articles, review and text in general. But what you expect from the country where most folks reads at most one book per year?