I’ve seen an old, archived post that asked “how do free games make money”, but i’ve played ad-less, free games with no microtransaction in them before. Do those just, not make any money?
(for example, how would Baldi’s Basics Classic Remastered make money?)
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Sometimes they’re loss leaders. You play a studio’s free game, and they hope it entices you to play their other games which make money traditionally (i.e. ads, micro-transactions, one time purchase, expansions, etc).
Sometimes the games used to be paid for in some way, but are old enough that no one is trying to recoup any costs so they are made available for free.
Sometimes, it’s just someones passion and they want to people to play so they simply don’t make money on it.
Your example of Baldi’s Basics Classic Remastered is probably a combination of the previous two.
And sometimes they might be selling your data.
They’re selling your data to other companies. They gather whatever data they can from your download and their ToS and sell it to whoever they can.
Sometimes it’s data harvesting. They collect whatever user data they can and sell it to data aggregation companies or whoever else is willing to pay.
However for a remastered, old game; they’re often passion projects. They’re done by one or two people for the joy of it and not to make money. In those cases the game itself usually just looses money but the developers will often have a way to donate to them on their website or GitHub.
Depends, games like the one you mentioned are passion projects and the author is okay with just accepting donations.
Some other games like vr chat can “afford” to be completely free of charge due to investor fundings.
Not everything in this world exists to generate a profit. There are, in fact, tens of thousands of games which are entirely free and do not have ANY revenue streams.
There are a great many games which are not only entirely free, but open source, so programmers are free to tinker with them and make their own versions.
If a product is advertised as free, then you are the product.
Advertising. Advertising. Advertising. Advertising. Advertising. Advertising. Advertising.
Usually it’s one of six things:
First, data harvesting. What they’re really looking for is data on how you play the game that they can sell to advertisers. This requires the game to be built in specific ways though.
Second, franchising. Perfect example is fallout shelter, it does have some minor MTX in it, and it did not originally launch with ads (though it has them now), but it’s main purpose was to draw people in and get them hyped up for the release of fallout 4. Sometimes a free game is an ad in and of itself. This also applies to free remasters, re-releases, or HD updates for old games. In those cases the bulk of the game is already there, so it costs them very little to simply put a fresh coat of paint on it and publish it again, but it still draws people into the larger franchise, especially if it’s one that’s been recently rebooted.
Third, patreon project. Some free games are made by solo indie devs, and they often have a patreon that offers early access to updates at the price of a subscription. Usually the free version of the game will be missing features or will be a few updates behind what’s available to supporters.
Fourth, it is literally malware. On very rare occasions a “free game” is actually just straight up malware thats making money by spying on you, stealing private information, or running a crypto miner in the background.
Fifth, it’s a “freeture”. Think solitaire, minesweeper, etc. Those games that everyone has on their PC. Those games aren’t actually “free”, you paid for an operating system, and the games came with it as a standard feature. Their purpose is to make the operating system more appealing to potential buyers. Same reason why you get a “free” game that’s included with a special edition console, or as a reward for signing up for some kind of service.
Sixth, they don’t. There’s actually no rule that says games have to make money. There are lots of free games out there with no strings attached or shady stuff you’re not seeing. They just don’t usually get a lot of attention and are usually not the best games.