Unless they just don’t idk im probably stupid 🙁
In: 2
There are a lot of different possible reasons a developer might choose to make their game available for free. Broadly speaking these fall into two categories: (1) The developer has some other plan for making money, (2) The developer doesn’t care about making money from the game.
Some common plans for developers to make money:
– Free version is a demo, charge money for the full version
– Charge money for DLC / cosmetics
– Charge money for stuff that makes the game easier or allows you to progress faster through the game
– Ads are part of the game experience
As you can see, there’s a wide range of products, developers, budgets and monetization strategies.
For example, there’s [I Love You, Colonel Sanders](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colonel_Sanders_A_Finger_Lickin_Good_Dating_Simulator/) — a fun, low-budget title where you date anime Colonel Sanders. You won’t be spending any money, but the entire game is one giant ad for Kentucky Fried Chicken.
For another example, consider Diablo Immortal, a big-budget title in a legendary franchise by a studio that’s an industry titan. A game that while nominally “free” turns out to actually be a [predatory money grab](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17lBUZgjTs) where some players [spend thousands of dollars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5J_KQZrqUo).
Traditional studios rarely make games that are free with no strings attached, because they are businesses in the business of making money. On the other hand, there are plenty of free games from small indie studios, individual developers, or Internet collective projects:
– For some, game development is a fun hobby, not a full-time job
– Build reputation
– Improve skills or try innovative things
– Show off the capability of some related tool or engine
– Teaching game development
– Fan games (use existing characters / worlds without permission, often companies don’t care or even actively encourage this if you don’t make money from it)
– Want to create art for art’s sake
A few examples of free games that come to mind:
– [Battle for Wesnoth](https://www.wesnoth.org/), a tactics game
– [MineTest](https://www.minetest.net/), a Minecraft clone
Sometimes old commercial games are eventually made free by their owners, for example:
– [OpenTTD](https://www.openttd.org/),
– [The Ur-Quan Masters](http://sc2.sourceforge.net/), a game from the 1990’s that was later released as open source
I should also mention game jams such as [Ludum Dare](https://ldjam.com/). A game jam is an event where individual game developers or small teams challenge themselves to create a game in a very short period of time (often a single weekend), possibly under some constraints (such as a particular theme). Usually jam games are available for free.
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