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Important Notice About File Downloads on DigitalFoundry.Net (Patreon)

Published:
2025-08-27 16:48:11
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Hi everyone, I’ve got some important news to share: the current digitalfoundry.net website is being mothballed on September 1st 2025, after which it will temporarily divert to this Patreon page until our own new website is ready to launch.

While the data on the existing site is owned by Digital Foundry - all 17.2TB of it - the fact is that the CMS on which it is hosted is owned by IGN, which means we have no rights to it and need to let it go. My advice would be to take advantage of the site to download everything you need before the site goes offline on September 1st.

In the transition process, we’ve also discovered that a large portion of our outgoings is for long-term video storage alone - a cost that will only goes up as we add more content. Therefore, it’s likely that we’ll need to be selective with the back catalogue of videos for download when we move to the next website.

That said, going forward we’ll be posting every new video here on Patreon, complete with download links, and we’ll consider re-adding the download functionality back into the new website we’re currently working on.

New website? Yes! This was the first thing we discussed in depth in our independence video and I’m excited to share that the site is already taking shape. The Gamer Network team are now in the process of exporting Digital Foundry’s entire content archive from Eurogamer - every article, every screenshot, every benchmark - where everything will find a new home on our own site.

Beyond that, it’s all about architecting what the next generation Digital Foundry website actually is and what function it serves. One of our key objectives for the next era is to get our content out there to as many people as possible on as many different media - so alongside video, social media, and our podcast, this website is going to be crucial.

On top of that, the website should also be a proper, fully featured destination for Supporters - and we’d love to hear your feedback. For example, the DF Discord is a busy and thriving place but... should we be considering a proper forum as well?

We’ll be updating with more details on the website soon, but for now, please do make use of digitalfoundry.net while it stands to get the videos you want.

Files

Comments

Peter

Thanks for the update Rich, looking forward to seeing the new site and again, congratulations! Hope the transition goes a smoothly as possible!

pjay

I think a web-based forum would be a great way to bring this content in-house.

Spoggi99

Sad to see the old site go, but really excited for what’s next! It’s awesome that you’re building something fully your own now. Definitely looking forward to the new site. A proper forum sounds like a great idea! I’ve never been a fan of using Discord for this kind of discourse. The channel structure feels too fragmented and the search functionality just isn’t great for revisiting older content. Keep up the amazing work and have a nice rest of the week! :)

Martijn van der Wal

Quick thought: maybe you could consider only HEVC uploads for your future website to cut down on storage/bandwidth costs?

mrtnptrs

Ok, am gonna download some videos now, but honestly don't like this. I wished you and IGN could make a deal to backup the data and upload it to something like The Internet Archive at least. I feel lucky to have downloaded already many many videos from the DF site in the past. Likely will keep downloading stuff then in the coming few days, but I'm honestly a bit worried many will... possibly causing outages.

MittenFacedLass

Little nervous about the back catalog becoming potentially permanently unavailable, to be honest, lads. A big part of supporting DF, for me at least, is having access to all that. September 1st is coming up pretty fast. Will try to grab stuff I've been meaning to archive. Looking forward to the new site and excited for you all, but a little worried re: access to "pristine downloads." Hopefully nothing to worry over.

Andrew Barker

Maybe look into adding torrent downloads to spread the load alongside standard video links with a nice message saying torrents reduce your costs and support the channel.

ConcreteLlama

Oh man that's in less than a week, pretty short notice but totally understandable given the circumstances. I think I've got almost every DF video on my server somewhere but I'll try check before the deadline. I'm away right now otherwise I'd try make some adjustment to DF downloader to make a mass download easier (I specifically wrote it to *not* hammer the servers with a mass download of everything). Out of interest is there any cost to you if there's a sudden huge spike in traffic?

digitalfoundry

We would actually prefer h.264 as the quality is higher - and the computational cost of encoding HEVC is 2x h.264. HEVC has become a bit of a rod for our backs.

digitalfoundry

Per the post, we own the data, IGN does not, so we could do something like that. The problem is the CMS that powers the site, which we do not own.

Liar of Partinel

Respectfully, how often do you actually go back to watch an older DF video where it's *gotta* be the pristine download?

DyeHardX86

Look forward to the website in all it's glory and the Lossless Video Download archive is one of my favorite features of DF and the reason I supported at first keep up the good work and good luck moving your Database to a new secure home in an expediant fashion we hope.

Daniel

Thank you for the update and the hard work. Decisions like this are tough to make and addressing them head-on is the right thing to do. Appreciate the transparency!

Andrew Barker

One advantage that a forum has over Discord is that it's an archive of knowledge and discussion into the future. There are great swaths of info that are gonna disappear in to the void because of the shift to discord away from forums.

TheBrainninja

an, forgot to say with the initial announcement, but EXTREME CONGRATS ON THE INDEPENDENCE!!!! it’s an absolute shame a venerable publication like Eurogamer had to go the way it did, but I’m y’all get to be the masters of your own destiny going forward

Rickkity-T

Good luck with the move! Just wanted to chime in and say that using DigitalFoundry.net to download and watch your videos is the primary reason I’m subscribed to the Patreon– besides supporting the team of course. It’s my main method of watching your content, especially when it comes to HDR footage. I love having the ability to view your work without YouTube compression in the mix, so I greatly value the website and what it affords. I totally understand the constraints involved when it comes to hosting such large video files; Hopefully you won’t have to be too selective when it comes to future uploads. Looking forward to what comes next!

ConcreteLlama

HEVC is also less compatible. Personally I wouldn't have an issue with dropping HEVC

Allan Lindqvist

You should consider making torrents for the back catalog so supporters can crowdfund the bandwidth 🙂 I think a forum on the website would be overkill and also require a bunch of moderation, but maybe it could have a more organized way of tracking questions for the direct? Maybe something with upvotes and tags for answered or OT questions

LordRelix

Consider a rotating video library. Videos can be stored in an S3 Glacier storage for cheap and rotated monthly? Maybe even the alternative of having a torrent/private torrents?

Rickkity-T

Personally speaking, all the time! Probably at least once a week. Watching an old DF Retro episode is a great way to relax on the weekends, and there’s no better way to witness all the effort John puts into capturing every pixel!

CrispyNougat

I want a site that functions like one from the late 90s or early 2000s, not one of these modern endlessly scrolling websites with no real information.

Tech Kappen

Yes! Forums! The chill golden era of pre-gamergate gaming forums *will* be dragged kicking and screaming into 2026 damn it!

MittenFacedLass

Whenever I go back, I go to the original files. I've stored a significant amount of the library on my own server, but I haven't made my way through the back catalog completely.

MittenFacedLass

As a side note, would definitely be interested in a forum. Discords are not super my thing, as great as they are.

Perfect_Organism

100% this. I find Discord (and IM based communication - I'm a nightmare in group chats) take up waaaaaaay too much of my head space? Or something, I'm not sure. But a forum? Hell yeah, down for that. Appreciate thats another branch to moderate though.

mrtnptrs

If possible, till the old website goes down, could the validity of download links to videos be significantly extended? It seems like it only stays valid for less than an hour currently. But if it was extended for significantly longer, people like me could keep downloading the content for archiving purposes overnight for example by putting them in a large queue. This would be really awesome, if possible.

mrtnptrs

But at the moment we don't know what videos will or will not return for download on the new site eventually. But good that you are looking into possibly archiving these on https://archive.org/details/gamevideos per your comment above.

Thomas Hargreaves

Hi Rich, I have a 5 year-old Dell EMC server I’m upgrading to a more recent one - This is for my SME Business. Feel free to message me, as I’d be happy to donate this to you, with some funding to get it to the storage capacity you need. It’s very powerful as a storage device, maybe I’ve read the post wrong but hope this could be of assistance.

TragicHz

I agree. Chat, even one that’s searchable like Discord, does not replace forums.

digitalfoundry

No, everything we produce would continue to be uploaded. "Going forward we’ll be posting every new video here on Patreon, complete with download links". The issue is the huge storage footprint on the older content and how best to handle that.

digitalfoundry

That's a great idea but again, we don't own the site and have no access to its code so we can't make changes.

Deadeyes

If DF wanted to put the videos out as torrents I would be happy to seed!!!

Deadeyes

I would gladly seed! They already have DRM free downloads, so I don't see why not to do a torrent. Granted I'm by no means an expert in any of these topics.

Deadeyes

I would be happy to seed, and I'm sure many others would be too! Crowd source the bandwidth!!

Darryl Young

I’d love to have a DF forum! Discord is great, but things get buried too easily. I can see myself spending a lot of time in a DF forum!

mrtnptrs

Ok, sad. And I understand that it might be too last minute to ask IGN for such a big favor... I'll just do my best then to gather all footage of games that are dear to me. Really hope the CMS doesn't go down then before September 1st...

Martin

Having access to the huge archive is one of the selling points of the supporter program to me as well (besides supporting the creation of new content of course). But given the comments so far, reducing to a single file format (whether it's HEVC or h.264) and providing torrents seem reasonable to me. Not sure whether torrents would help a lot with the "back catalogue", but free up bandwidth from new videos and discarding HEVC reduces required storage of the existing content significantly.

Alvin Crespo

Ugh sucks that this is happening so quickly. Would be nice if they gave you more time. Either way, you've got this. Addi g downloads to the website is great but any reason not to just keep it on YouTube. Other than that a forum would be amazing to archive discussions.

Chris Munch

As a former webmaster for a large site who also created and ran the forums, let me give the advice of NEVER doing forums unless you're ready to spend endless hours moderating them and deal with endless numbers of knuckleheads crying about how you're against them and they're going to lead a boycott, when you literally have no idea who they are or what they're complaining about. People will say just let some volunteers moderate the forum ... well that's great, until you start getting flooded with people saying the mods are biased and against them and if you don't get rid of them they're going to lead a boycott. Forums do create a very small, very active number base who will stay subscribed, which is great, but once the cliques form, they'll run off new comers. It's a mess. Just my personal experience, but it certainly doesn't seem like a unique experience. With all that said, if you do create forums, I'll certainly join and would love to be proven wrong.

Brad

If you did want to add it to the site cloudflare R2 offers free egress (unsure up to what amount). That’s how I get DLSS Swapper to do 1.5TB in bandwidth a week for $0. Without that I would be screwed.

Jonathan Hamilton

Adding my voice to the chorus clamoring for a forum. Say that three times fast.

t00thr0t

Would be awesome if the videos can somehow be downloaded automatically. People will find ways (like df downloader) but I guess if the videos are posted via Patreon as an URL then there would be a way!

Carloss

I feel exactly the same. It would be sad to lose access to the old catalog. Every now and then I go back and watch old content and I'm really happy with that possibility. I'll probably download some of the most important content (for me) in this few days.

Abadaba-Pling Boink Wee Juhu

Just drop having both x264 and x265, switch to solely x265, it's more than evolved enough to fully replace x264 now in 2025. Also drop hosting on such an expensive host, use Backblaze B2 + Cloudflare CDN. B2 storage is just $120/mo for 20 TB). Egress from B2 to/through Cloudflare is unlimited and free, so your bill is basically just storage.

Pixelbrei

Sad to hear that this is happening. Since I'm on vacation I don't have enough space available to archive the data myself before September 1st. Hoping the community can find an alternative to make the content available again.

Fractal Flow

Thank you for confirming this! A while back I spent some time doing casual pixel peeping comparisons between both versions, and h.264 always came out on top. I thought I was going mad, the way people speak so highly of HEVC!

Fractal Flow

Then I will certainly not download any videos. My hoarding tendencies be damned ;)

RayCharlizard

Should definitely consider transitioning that back-catalog into a sort of "DF Legacy" and throw it on archive.org. Let the community keep it alive. In this day and age 17.2 TB really isn't that much for us data hoarders. You've got some ultra nerds in the community, take advantage of us!

pjay

Yep, Discord is horrible

Christian Kündig

Others have suggested cheap hosting already, but worst case throw everything older than 90 days on AWS Glacier and retrieve on demand (patrons can click a "retreive video" and get an email once it's ready - maybe with some rate limiting).

mrtnptrs

Site is already down for maintenance it seems. "We're under construction. Please check back for an update soon. " I assume IGN took it down a bit earlier then expected?

Carloss

The same happened to me a couple of hours ago, but I've found that deppending on your ISP (i.e. your geoip location or routing) you will hit a different server or point of presence of the CDN (I believe it’s fastly). From Spain this is working for me. Use 151.101.129.55 as the destination of the domain for digitalfoundry.net (for example modifying the hosts file on your OS). I'm downloading everything I can right now. Hope this helps.

Carloss

Edit: I was served with another url for download the Sony Marathon video, not exactly that one, one video download has failed me too located at that domain. Many are starting to disappear with 404 responses :( FYI. I'm able to download it (for now) with the method I've described earlier.

Niko

I‘d love your website to have written analysis articles as well. Miss them at the moment. It’s often that I go back to articles to find PC optimized settings, and such, of older titles. Having those in a table on a website is much more convenient than searching for this in a video.

Chris Cottrell

Genuinely keen to hear what purpose the forum would serve over the discord? feels a little wheel reinventy but perhaps I’m missing something

Matthias Haltenhof

I really really hope you get a SEO involved in that whole process. It would be a pain for me to see you loose all those strong Google rankings.

Kim

With the next website, please, please, please, please don't neglect a RSS feed! (And as others have already suggested: happy to seed and donate some storage and bandwidth for torrenting.)

Kim

Same! Despite Discord's message threading, having multiple discussions in one channel is confusing to this millennial. And to say nothing of the impossibility of looking up info from old messages.

Erik Kelly

Not loving the idea of losing the downloadable back catalog, especially with three days' notice and apparently some downtime during those three days? Hate to be that guy, but folks on the retro tier aren't exactly drowning in new content. I stay on to support the team. And the back catalog is a good perk to compensate. Seconding those suggesting removing the x264 videos and going with AWS archival or Web Archive. Switching to "downloads available for select content, otherwise watch on YouTube' feels like en----ification to me.

Lee

I'll be honest I don't pay for early access I pay for pristine 4k and HDR downloads only. I pay also to support the team but my main benefit is the HUGE archive of barely compressed video

Real Frame Collector

I would support being selective about what you pay to have stored to be shared. At the end of the day, more important that you folk can pay bills and keep making the vids you want to than to keep so much of the back catalogue available for those who might get round to downloading it some day (let alone watch it or utilise it). I'm sure you'll think of some bespoke solution that'll work for most folk. Also support the idea of a forum, it allows for discussions to be added to over a long period of time and would be useful to see how issues develop over time. Discord is just like an ocean with larger communities, if you're not there when something happens, any signs of the discussion would be wiped away within hours. Obviously there's an overhead in terms of moderation but might be worth an experimental period to see if the uptake and engagement are worth the hassle. There seems to be a move back towards bespoke niche sites in games media, glad to see DF also taking up that mantle.

Haddoxx

The site is back; has it been given a stay of execution?

Konic & Snuckles

So you're saying a not insignificant portion of DF videos are now permanently lost media? Isn't that at odds with your whole philosophy? Can you not just create a new Patreon tier to allow people willing to pay extra to access to the ENTIRE back catalog, not just a curated list?

Thomas Joynt

Please, please, please do not make old videos completely unavailable. Find cheaper hosting with slower service, create a private BitTorrent tracker, remove h264 versions when HEVC is available, charge extra for access to old files, or upload old files to archive.org. At the very least, please make all the files available again for a couple weeks so we can download them. Some people like me were not online the week of this announcement. A private BitTorrent tracker would allow you to restrict access to only DF members and allow us to host and share the files between ourselves. Here's an example of how to save over 90% compared to the default AWS EBS storage settings: 1) Changing the default AWS SSD (gp2) EBS storage to Cold HDD (asc1) EBS storage reduces the monthly cost of 18 TB ( 2 X 9 TB volumes) from 1,843.20 USD to 276.48 USD. Keep the old files on HDD and only store the newest files on more expensive SDD. 2) You have copies of the video files on your own storage, so you don't need snapshots. Changing the default 2 x daily snapshots to no snapshots reduces the cost by 930.57 USD per month. Combined, these reduce the cost from 2,773.77 USD/mo to 276.48 USD 3) The above prices are for the cheapest hosting [US East (N. Virginia)]. Hosting in London costs 16% more and in Frankfurt 20% more. I use AWS as an example because I am most familiar with it and it is popular: not as a recommendation per se. I'm sure you guys have already looked into ways to save money on hosting costs, but I hope this helps somehow. Thank you so much for all the fantastic work you guys do and congrats on going indie! DF is really a unique and special group: you consistently make the highest quality, most in-depth technical, educational, and entertaining videos and articles about video games and computers today.

Pedro Carvalho

Any news on the state of this? I want to access older stuff