As most of you already know, there are lots of videogames you can play for free: either they're old games whose authors have decided to give away, or they're games being distributed for free from the start, usually by independent developers or amateurs. Often freeware developers accept free donations from players as a support for their effort and expenses.
Freeware games have been around for a long time, but thanks to the Internet they've obtained enhanced visibility; moreover, developers may easily share their work online or combine their efforts towards more complex games. With the advent of online communities, many other possibilities have opened up regariding game advertising, discussion, design, code sharing, and the quality of such games has benefited from it.
Let's not forget about technological support: making games today is a lot simpler than it was before, thanks to the evolution of entirely free development libraries, as well as game development frameworks, which help people who don't know programming languages.
Personally, I've never tried the newer ones (Multimedia Fusion, Game Maker and so on), but years ago I tried using Klik&Play, which is basically the ancestor of Multimedia Fusion. I think frameworks like that really help concentrate more on level design and art without having to bother too much on the technical aspects of programming, such as fine-management of resources, compatibility and text languages themselves. I do believe though that the loss of flexibility can be heavy: the risk is that of people simply making clones of other games, using only tried-and-true game mechanics, experimenting only on appearance and design. That said, there's still ample room for variety and innovation with these frameworks, and they're apparently miles away in terms of flexibility when compared with what I used some 15 years ago.
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