The Internet today has many expanding and popular areas of interest, however the one that stands out head and shoulders above the rest, for fun at least, has to be free online gaming. For any of you that have not played online games before then all you need to do is type in free online games (or be more specific if you are looking for a particular type of game to play, such as free Sudoku games or free motorbike games) into your search engine and, hey presto you will be presented with a monster list of gaming sites that are all vying for your attention. Click on your chosen result and the website will open a page of games that just require the click of a mouse button to play for free in your web browser.



The advent of decent free online gaming was born after the development of a wonderful piece of animation application computer code, called flash, created by Macromedia in 1996. Flash greatly enhanced online animation, smoothed graphic scrolling and improved game play response times opening a whole new world of online possibilities. At first only a few free online games were available, these were good to play and certainly a great advancement of the non-flash based games of bygone times. A few of the games released allowed you to complete them in their entirety while others allowed you to play a level or two before eventually requiring you to register or purchase the full version for download to play on your computer.

However, playing games online for free really started to warm up with the progression of online games advertising. As many of the worlds advertisers started to turn to the internet there was a significant boom in revenues allowing online games publishers to be able to earn an income of the adverts that were shown either in the game itself or along side the game in the allotted advertising space. The advert provides an income to the games publisher when either provided as a page impression or it is actually clicked on by the player. This negated the need for the owner of the gaming site to charge for the game itself and indeed provided and incentive to the actual games developers to start coding and developing better quality games to play online for free.

At this point I would normally say the rest is history however relatively recently there has been an explosion of a newer type of free online browser based game, namely MMORPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. A MMORPG is a style of computer role-playing games in which a very large number of players interact with one another, within a virtual game world using nothing more than their own computer web browsers. The most popular MMORPG to date is World of Warcraft, which is estimated to have ten million paying subscribers as of 2009, however free online MMORPG's are now widely available making money via online advertising or retail sales that come as a by-product of the games players. If you decide to play games online for free of this type then you really are entering a gaming world that is nearly as good as the home games consoles such as Sony's PlayStation or Microsoft's X-Box, not bad as a freebie I think you would agree!