I played Saints Row The Third a few years ago on a friend's XBox 360, but I only played some side activities and didn't play any missions, so I never really got around to purchasing it. Then XBox Live offered a free "Deals With Gold" download of Saints Row The Third, so I downloaded and completed the entire campaign and all the activities. I really liked all the character and vehicle customizations, along with the cool graphics and lighting in the game, so I ended up spending a lot of time playing it even after the campaign was done. After that I was hooked (so, apparently, Volition's marketing strategy worked)! Then I purchased Saints Row 2 and played the entire campaign with a friend through System Link, and it was awesome, even though the graphics were somewhat dated.
My biggest disappointment, though, was that I couldn't get back to many of those really cool locations that I'd played through in the missions. That was just frustrating! So I searched the Internet for any possible cheats to get back. I came across saintsrowmods.com and I saw all the great mods that were available for the PC version. Sandbox+ did exactly what I wanted, so at that point I decided to purchase the PC versions of Saints Row 2, 3, and 4 on Steam.
The games are just extremely clever and hilarious, the characters are very endearing and the voice acting is top notch, and there's just enough rudeness to keep it fun! And they even had the real Burt f**king Reynolds! Ha ha ha! What more could you want in a game? It was the campaigns that got me hooked, but this saintsrowmods.com website keeps me coming back regularly. So even though Volition didn't make any money from the first game I got for free, I ended up buying them all anyways and much of it was because of the added value provided by saintsrowmods.com.