Baseless speculation about freeware games and free games
I was very into freeware games as a kid. I got into indie games in high school after getting into free web games and then discovering Knytt, Seiklus, and other classic freeware indie games from the 2000s.
I was playing these games primarily because I had no money. I had an allowance up through high school that was only one dollar a week, which was an impossibly small amount of money in the 2000s, just like it is today. Buying any game at all was a project beyond my patience or mental capacity, so all the games I had were received as gifts.
There was no such thing as a free commercial game giveaway, so the main games you could play for free were flash games, or the weird ones made by cool weird people. As I got older and became a more genuine fan of the scene, the "free" bit continued to be a huge draw for me. In my first two years of college, I believe I purchased less than five or so games. I remember that buying World of Goo was a big deal for me.
But I've been thinking recently about the reason why I don't play many freeware games anymore, and I've decided that the main reason is not actually that I have money now. If anything, I buy new games less frequently than I used to in the late 2010s, when I would buy tons of extremely cheap indie narrative games every year... often in bundles.
The reason I don't play as many freeware games is not even related to live-service F2P games. I've worked on those games, but I personally am just not interested in playing the same thing every day all year long, so I'm not really the target audience for them. I'm looking, most of the time, for completable single-player experiences.
I actually think that reason I don't play as many completable, single-player freeware games as I used to is actually because I now have a backlog of Steam titles.
There's some chatter in game dev circles recently about how we all now compete with our own back catalogs, and about how players might choose to skip our newer releases because they're totally satisfied with our older ones. I think the reason I personally don't play freeware games as much anymore is the same reason I don't buy as many games anymore: I have a massive backlog in Steam, full of artistically-significant completable single-player games from the last fifteen years, and it would take me forever to play them. And I got loads of them for cheap as shit, or for free. I could stop buying Steam games permanently today and still have enough of them to play to keep me busy for years.
It's possible that as an industry we completely boned ourselves by giving away so many free games. For a certain player age group, a lot of the games we gave away in 2015 may be games we're still competing with in 2025. And and I think we also kind of boned the freeware scene too!
I've been thinking back to what my habits were like in college and my first few years after graduation. When I wasn't feeling like I could afford to buy a game, I'd always check out freeware experimental and art games instead. If I were ever sent back to that time with my current Steam backlog, back to when my entertainment budget every month was precisely zero, I would play these zillion cheap games from my backlog to play instead. I would not be downloading freeware experimental games anywhere near as often as I used to, because I'd have that strange guilty pressure of the backlog looming over me.
I'm sure there are lots of people in my position - people who used to play freeware titles often, but in 2025 more often choose to just load up Steam. When Steam released their 2024 end of year data for everyone's account pages, it revealed that only 15% of all playtime from Steam users is spent on new games. 37% is spent on games 8 or more years old. I'd love to get more granular information on how long players have owned the games they're playing from their backlogs. I am curious how many of them, like me, sometimes let a old-ass bundle game sit for years before starting it up.
I dunno. I can't help but wonder what our industry would be like if we hadn't so viciously undervalued the value of our own labor in such a focused way throughout the 2010s, or if this vicious undervaluing had not become such an integral part of our industry in the 2020s. I don't know! There's a lesson to learn here, I think, but we might never have an opportunity to apply the learning.