Category:Freeware Games

Video Games that can be downloaded and distributed for free legally (not that illegality stops some people).

One genre that tend to have a lot of freeware games is the Interactive Fiction genre as since the 1990s, the genre hasn't been as commercially viable. An annual contest for shorter works generally turns up at least two or three genuinely excellent examples of freeware IF games.

There are several websites dedicated to covering and hosting freeware games:

• liberatedgames.com is a site for formerly commercial games that are now available for free (Technically, not all of them are distributable; some may be downloaded for free, but only from the original company.)
• The Indiegames.com weblog is a regularly updated blog that informs about indie video games. While not all indie games are free, many of them are.
• Play This Thing! also has quite a few listed, with the option of filtering the list for free games only.
• FreeGamer, is devoted exclusively to Free and Open Source Software.
• RMN focuses primarily on freeware RPGs oftentimes made using the RPG Maker series.
• Freem focuses primarily on freeware doujin games.

The Other Wiki keeps a list of available freeware games, as well as lists for commercial games released as freeware and open source games. Linux users have a lot of these available and updated via software repositories.

For those of you who have no idea what games to choose, this guide presents some of the best voted on by /v/. Fair warning: not all of these games run on all operating systems.

If the game advertises itself as free but is only partly free, the game is an Allegedly Free Game. If the game's developers have forgotten about it or vanished entirely, but its exact legal standing is still questionable, it may be Abandonware. If it was made after an existing game, it's Fan Remake or Fan Sequel (not all of them are free games proper, what with Game Mods using commercial engines).

Also see Web Games.