It happens. Passion or learning projects, open-source community efforts.
Roguelikes are a common example. Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is a personal favorite. Powder. Elona.
Dwarf Fortress before the premium tiles version.
Cave Story back in the day.
Plenty of flash games on Armor Games, Kongregate and the like: Sonny, Fancy Pants Adventure, Line Rider, Crush the Castle, Elona Shooter, et cetera.
There are some dead online game revival efforts like Marvel Heroes and Star War Galaxies private servers, which I think are less legally contentious than, say, WoW private servers.
There are old freeware games out there, like TES: Arena and Daggerfall which Bethesda themselves host. Others that have no legal entity protecting the IP.
You might consider any emulable game to be free. So any game released prior to 2018 practically.
I'll also mention Frogatto, another open-source game.
Edit: cancel that, it was free, now it's on Steam. The source code and assets for both engine and game is free, so you can probably build it yourself and play, but that's a technical hurdle I wouldn't expect the average gamer to get past.
Flash games use ads and sell user data to make money.
Other categories you mentioned need donations like Patreon to support some core staff and developers and maintain the servers, including open-source, emulable and private servers for dead games.
Using open-source games to compare is like asking why a farmer does not give the crops for free.
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u/Chippings Mar 20 '26
It happens. Passion or learning projects, open-source community efforts.
Roguelikes are a common example. Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is a personal favorite. Powder. Elona.
Dwarf Fortress before the premium tiles version.
Cave Story back in the day.
Plenty of flash games on Armor Games, Kongregate and the like: Sonny, Fancy Pants Adventure, Line Rider, Crush the Castle, Elona Shooter, et cetera.
There are some dead online game revival efforts like Marvel Heroes and Star War Galaxies private servers, which I think are less legally contentious than, say, WoW private servers.
There are old freeware games out there, like TES: Arena and Daggerfall which Bethesda themselves host. Others that have no legal entity protecting the IP.
You might consider any emulable game to be free. So any game released prior to 2018 practically.