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And you know what games were released via shareware? Doom. Quake. Great games that made you want to save up to get the full version. But even if you couldn’t do that you still got a solid playing experience with the free version.
I feel like those of us who grew up in the 90s got to see a young utopia internet. I kind of wish we could hit the reset button and go back to those days.
Even when demos stopped being an entire third of the game, there was no artifice about being complete. There was no way for them to take unlimited amounts of your money. The Coconut Monkey wasn’t the cutesy face of gambling for scimitars. Lara Croft wasn’t the freebie in anyone’s gacha waifu collection. You just got some chunk of gameplay - often quite replayable, when you were hard-up! - and a come-on to buy the whole shebang.
Now you get a broken version of the whole game, and if you want it to work right and feel good and have everything, that’ll only cost you literally thousands of dollars. People beat Everquest for less money than modern garbage can take.
And you know what games were released via shareware? Doom. Quake. Great games that made you want to save up to get the full version. But even if you couldn’t do that you still got a solid playing experience with the free version.
I feel like those of us who grew up in the 90s got to see a young utopia internet. I kind of wish we could hit the reset button and go back to those days.
Even when demos stopped being an entire third of the game, there was no artifice about being complete. There was no way for them to take unlimited amounts of your money. The Coconut Monkey wasn’t the cutesy face of gambling for scimitars. Lara Croft wasn’t the freebie in anyone’s gacha waifu collection. You just got some chunk of gameplay - often quite replayable, when you were hard-up! - and a come-on to buy the whole shebang.
Now you get a broken version of the whole game, and if you want it to work right and feel good and have everything, that’ll only cost you literally thousands of dollars. People beat Everquest for less money than modern garbage can take.