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Posted: May 6th 2009 3:51PM Mr A said

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Based on the criteria you gave, I'm not sure how you can consider Free Realms to be a free game, because it's just another freemium game. It has an item mall like Wizard 101, but it also has content you can only access if you have a monthly subscription, also like Wizard 101.

So considering this list isn't supposed to include freemium games, Free Realms shouldn't be on the list because it is most certainly a freemium game.
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Posted: May 6th 2009 4:04PM Seraphina Brennan said

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I'm defining freemium as a content lock. Spellborn and W101 only let the user go up to a specific point until they have to pay to progress, such as buying new zones. (Which is darn cheap and totally worth it, by the way.)

Free Realms does not have these limitations -- the player can progress to the end of a silver job without having to purchase anything. Certainly if they wish to unlock extra jobs they can pay for them, but there is no glass ceiling on a player's progression.
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Posted: May 6th 2009 4:21PM Mr A said

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However, there are still jobs, quests, etc. that you can only access if you have a monthly subscription. Maybe you technically don't need them to access the majority of the game, but if you don't have access to everything the game has to offer, then you still don't truly have full access to the game. In order to access all the content of the game, you still need a monthly subscription.

You could technically say that you don't need those quests to progress. But you could say that of any MMORPG. In any MMORPG, you could skip a quest here and there and just grind on monsters if you'd rather. And with Wizard 101, you could simply declare that whatever areas are available for free constitutes the entire game and the other areas are just extra. But then you'd say, what about all the people accessing the other content, surely only the free area isn't all the game has to offer.

The same goes for Free Realms. To have the full experience of a game, you have to be able to access all parts and all things in that game. In Free Realms, you have to have a monthly subscription to be able to do that. Therefore, Free Realms is still just a freemium game.
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