Smartphones & F2P

(⚠️ tentative — to be written from the ledger) Play started reaching the daily lives of people who had never bought a game console. The iPhone (2007) and its app store (2008) were the tracks that carried it there. How money changed hands changed too. Start free, then pay along the way — one of the earliest games built this way was QuizQuiz, released by Korea's Nexon in October 1999 (it's often called "the first in the world," but similar systems were running around the same time in Furcadia and Neopets, so this map calls it "one of the earliest"). The word "freemium" was coined in March 2006, when the investor Fred Wilson asked his blog readers to help name this business model, and Jarid Lukin proposed combining free and premium. Here too, the shape of play existed first, and the name came after.