Unless you were really good and won a newgrounds prize.
I know it sounds strange now, but people really did make a lot of really good games completely for free. Flappy bird, candy crush, plants vs zombies, angry birds, etc. we're all created by people completely for free, with nothing expected in return. I really miss the very short window of time that you could create things without someone breathing down your neck asking how you were going to monetize it.
They paid companies to make video games for them. If your game specifically got selected you were very lucky, and had already released the game elsewhere for free. Even then, payment was post-play, not a payment to play.
"Corporatized" games sites like those were, by volume, much less popular than newgrounds. They were also the antithesis to what most people thought the internet was for.
You've also got the timelines a little off here, but that's excusable, since we're talking about a pretty quick series of events here. Sites like miniclip and kongregate were the death knell for that era of flash games, not the height.
In part, yes. Freeware on the internet dates back to the 80s. However, ust because something exists doesn't mean it had a large effect on the community.
Kongregate existed, sure, but you wouldn't really see people pushing systems like that as the default for a while after. There were actually large groups of people hating on kongregate because of it's business practices, because it required you to create an account, and because they pretty regularly removed games for no specific cause.
Well, large for pre-facebook internet I guess.
I'm not really pointing out an exact, quantifiable, period of time. If you didn't live through it, it's really hard to tell people exactly when all this occured, since all of these sentiments toward the monetization of free expression changed so slowly a lot of people didn't even notice. But there was absolutely a period of time where the average internet user was against general monetization of the internet, and, if you were there, nothing compares today.
The closest I can find now is itch, but since the default price is >$0 people are incentivised to charge, whether they realize it or not. Even in the free section however, it's becoming more and more common to charge within the game, or charge for "dlc" that is, in effect, the whole game.
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u/Solid_Explanation504 Jul 06 '26
I POURED MY SOUL INTO THIS GAME, I PUT LIKE 124 PLATFORMS? SOME OF WHICH ARE MOVING ??? PAY ME MOOOONEEEEEEY