this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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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.
Gunbound was the first game I remember having in game items you could buy with currency that you could also purchase for money. IIRC, they had one currency you could earn in game and another you could buy and each item in the shop had a price for each currency.
I remember thinking what kind of a cash cow that was back then (because wow existed when I first played gunbound and gold farmers also existed at that point and I could see that this model was even better because the owners of the game can just generate things as they need to rather than having to farm it in game) before moving on and never acting on that.