this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Meh. None of these were born like that. DLC was born because after the game was successful devs thought "cool let's develop some more content and sell that as well".
Early access was born because "shit we literally starve while we develop our game because we have no money, because our game isn't done yet to sell it".
Free to play was born... Well, pretty much like that probably.
But the other two were made greedy after the fact, they're not inherently an evil system. Even free to play can work when only selling cosmetics, where everyone has the same gameplay.
You just have to check and see how the developers of a game behave, how each system is implemented.
Free to play was born... Well, pretty much like that probably.
I'm no gaming historian, but I think F2P was first proved as a concept with the hats in Team Fortress 2.
The TF2 hats definitely proved the profitability of a cosmetic cash shop, but free-to-play or freemium games are older than that. Both RuneScape and MapleStory were early 00s and Turbine were also an early adopter of transitioning their MMOs from subscription based to freemium with both SWTOR and Dungeons and Dragons Online which at least initially massively increased their profit and sort of proved the viability of the model.
TF2 wasn't free to play when they started selling hats, IRC. It went free to play later on.
You're right, they went free-to-play in 2011 so the model was basically already proven at that point. They're a big actor and a notorious example but probably not historically significant in the proliferation of the F2P concept.