Free-to-play is a video game business model in which players are given access to a substantial part of a game's content without paying to start playing, with the publisher earning revenue instead through microtransactions for items, cosmetics or progress boosts, often using a dual-currency system, or through in-game advertising. Early virtual-item sales are traced to Matt Mihaly's 1997 game Achaea, and the model was popularized commercially by the South Korean company Nexon with QuizQuiz in 1999 and later MapleStory. By 2011 revenue from free-to-play games had overtaken revenue from paid, premium games on Apple's App Store, and the model now dominates much of the games industry.
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