AT TIMES, being a gamer can feel like participating in a collective delusion about reasonable ways to spend money. New consoles are, simply put, ludicrously expensive. The MSRP of a new PlayStation 5, for instance, is $500, but stock is so limited you’ll struggle to find one listed for less than $800. The games can gouge your credit card too. You’ll pay $60 for many of the most well-regarded titles, including “Elden Ring,” “Metroid Dread” and “Psychonauts 2.” But in recent years, a lot of game developers have adopted a pricing model that lets basically anyone participate. In fact, many of the most popular games are now “free-to-play.”
These kinds of games, which usually cost nothing to download and play but offer options for players to spend money on things like extra characters, new levels, and cosmetic upgrades, are nothing new. Carly Kocurek, a professor of digital humanities and media studies at Illinois Institute of Technology, says “free-to-play” video games have a longer history than most people realize, tracing back to “Furcadia” in 1996, “Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands” in 1997 and “Neopets” in 1999. “There’s a lot of casual games that use this model,” she said. “The first version of ‘FarmVille,’ launched in 2009, relied on it.”
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/free-to-play-video-games-11648833109
