What was the first Free-to-play game released?

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RenegadeSteve

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#1  Edited By RenegadeSteve
Member since 2013 • 262 Posts

Been reading up on all the free to play games, was curious about what was the first game too actually do it. And when did everyone start hyping it up?

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commonfate

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#2 commonfate
Member since 2010 • 13320 Posts

I don't know about first but League of Legends and Team Fortress 2 are what brought it to prominence.

Still have yet to see anything that tops DotA 2 in terms of balance or value.

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RenegadeSteve

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#3 RenegadeSteve
Member since 2013 • 262 Posts

@commonfate: I always thought it was Team Fortress 2 for some odd reason

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Tokeism

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#4 Tokeism
Member since 2006 • 2365 Posts

The free-to-play model originated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, coming from a series of highly successful MMOs targeted towards children and casual gamers, including Furcadia, Neopets, RuneScape, MapleStory, and text-based dungeons such as Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands.

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RenegadeSteve

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#5 RenegadeSteve
Member since 2013 • 262 Posts

@Tokeism: Really? man i didn't think it was that far back, i just assumed it started in 07 or 08

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foxhound_fox

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#6 foxhound_fox
Member since 2005 • 98532 Posts

Compared to modern standards, Doom Shareware was a F2P game.

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Mesomorphin

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#7 Mesomorphin
Member since 2013 • 903 Posts

Oh wow yeah games like Neopets, runescape, maple-story and dragon quest kind of started a "trend" however popular they may of been, however the whole concept of "free to play" has been around for years! even earlier than those games, free games to play on your browser and on cheapy websites have always existed!

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PapaTrop

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#8 PapaTrop
Member since 2014 • 1792 Posts

Free games have existed since the birth of the internet at least, but since even before then really. Not exactly the same concepts employed by games like League of Legends or Dota, but free games have been distributed for a long time.

As far as the modern definition goes.... I don't actually know. I guess games like Neopets or Runescape would have been some of the first.

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Black_Knight_00

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#9  Edited By Black_Knight_00
Member since 2007 • 77 Posts

There were free type-in games printed on magazines in the ZX Spectrum age (1980s)

For the youngsters: the developer (usually one kid) would send the source code (about 100 lines) to the publisher, they would print it integrally in the magazine and the readers could compile and play the free game by typing the whole code on their computer.