January 31st, 2012 
Kinect Me Before the start of Free MMO’s way back in the start 90’s, the expenses needed to run an MMO to cover its servers and constantly needed game upgrades forced managers to stand back and discover a new angle on where this kind of money can be pulled from.
First glance managers decided on top of buying the title, a subscription would also be needed from its players for the game to continue to pay for its constant wave of expenses and developer wages. Some of the first payment methods actually had the consumer instead of paying every month like we have and know of now, but making them paying by the hour!
This progressed into gamers concentrating on one game at a time due to them not wanting to pay for another. Insert the birth of “World of Warcraft”. This game jumped in in and claimed control of the genre. Gamers where dragged in by its huge array of combat mechanics and social grouping systems plus its ever growing nature of new game upgrades and new material which left gamers with always having something new and fun to do.
Still to this day World of Warcraft dominates the MMO gaming genre. If you’re going to pay for a game better off paying for the one that has the highest amount of content and player base to talk to correct? This was the kind of question that would have kickstarted off the new era of payment options. Not paying for anything!
The first Free MMO’s started to show not to far after World of Warcraft stamped its position on the P2P (pay to play) genre. At first these small developed little Free MMO’s were reviewed as being poorly made and inferior compared to their P2P (pay to play) brothers so were ignored by the general gamer. In general this was a safe assumption.
However with everything pointing in the way of failure these free MMO’s begun to head in the other direction. Raking in large amounts of gamers from all over the world and lead to a new payment option, the micro-transaction. In a nut shell Free MMO’s are for the most part free however hidden within these little money spinners usually contains an in game store.
These stores can be used to aquire all types of extras for your gaming experience. From items to boost your characters stats or goods to make you stand out from the crowd, this kind of money making started to do just that and managers were seeing intense amounts of income from gamers.
Now we are starting to see the bigger companies take on the genre of Free MMO’s with big title games such as Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online and Conan all making the change from pay to play to F2P. And that’s just 3 to name, there are endless amount to choose from and with the added bonus that they are free you can test drive them all till you find out which has your interest without having to pay for a thing!
If you are interested in looking at more check out some of these Free MMO’s feel free check out this site http://planetmmos.com and read reviews and news about many Free FPS titles and many other top titles.
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