Vivendi Universal Games has now done this with the Tribes game series. You can now download the first game in the series, Starsiege: Tribes, and the second game Tribes 2 for free. These are both still a lot of fun to play and if you don’t already have them in your gaming library, they are definitely worth your time to download. You can find the download links on the Gaming Freebies page.
It has been quite common for game publishers to offer free limited demos of their games, but this new generosity is a relatively new development. Obviously, Vivendi Universal Games believes that they will more than make up for any lost revenue in sales of the first two games by generating more interest in the new Tribes: Vengeance game which at this writing is soon to be released.
No matter whether they are right about that or not (and I’m sure they are) the Gaming community also wins with two great games for free.