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Before app stores, digital storefronts and endless in-game purchases, there was shareware. You could get a game for free, play it, and decide whether it was worth sending money to the person who made it.

In this episode of Artifacts, I look back at shareware games, registration cards, and the surprisingly personal relationship between creators and players, and how that compares with today's world of DLC, premium editions, and paying to unlock more of what you've already bought.

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There was a time when you could get a computer game for free.

Not a free-to-play game, not a demo with a giant buy now button sitting permanently in the corner,

and not something designed to sell you coins, characters, skins,

or whatever else a publisher had decided you might want, but a real game.

You'd get it from a friend, copy it from a floppy disk, find it on a computer

magazine's cover disk, or download it from somewhere on the early internet.

You'd install it, play it, and eventually discover that if you wanted the rest

of the game, there was a pretty simple solution. You could buy it.

That was shareware. And looking back at it now, there's something strange and

yet comforting about the whole arrangement.

Because shareware wasn't really asking you to trust the software,

it was asking you to trust the person who made it.

If you grew up around computers in the 80s or 90s, there's a good chance you've

encountered shareware without necessarily thinking about what the word meant.

You might have picked up a floppy disk from a friend. Maybe it came with a computer magazine.

Maybe you downloaded something from a bulletin board or one of these early software

libraries that seemed to contain an almost impossible amount of stuff.

You installed the game, and there it was. Sometimes it was a complete little

game. Sometimes it was the first part of something bigger.

But you got enough to understand what the developer was trying to do and enough

to decide whether you liked it.

And if you did, you were given a choice. Keep playing the version you had or

send the developer some money and get the registered version.

There might be a registration card in the box, or an address on the screen,

or there might be instructions telling you where to send a cheque or money order.

And that was it. There was no payment processor waiting behind the menu,

no subscription, no digital storefront, no account you had to create before

you could even start the game.

Just a developer saying, essentially, here's something I made,

try it, and if you like it, support me.

That sounds really simple now, but at the time it was actually quite radical.

The real interesting thing about shareware was that the developer couldn't force you to pay.

If you had an unregistered copy of the game there was usually nothing stopping

you from continuing to use it or copy it, give it to somebody else or put on

another floppy disk and pass it around.

The technology wasn't particularly good at enforcing the rules so the model

depended, at least in part, on something much less technical. Trust.

The developer trusted that if you enjoyed your work, you'd do the right thing.

And the player had to make the decision for themselves.

Now that doesn't mean that everyone paid. They obviously didn't.

Shareware developers had plenty of complaints about people happily using their

software without ever registering it.

But that's what makes the model so interesting. The transaction wasn't built

around stopping you from accessing something.

It was built around letting you experience it and hoping you'd see enough value

in it to want to support the person who made it.

And there was something wonderfully human about that.

A lot of shareware came from small developers or tiny teams.

People making software because they had an idea, or because they wanted to solve

a problem, or because they thought they could make something better.

There wasn't necessarily a giant company sitting behind the product.

Sometimes it was just one person and somewhere on that registration form was their name.

You weren't paying a faceless corporation, you were sending money to someone

who had made something you liked.

Of course, shareware didn't last forever in its original form.

The internet got faster. Software became larger.

Online payments became normal. Downloading things became easier.

The whole process of getting software changed. And in games,

the basic idea of giving people a taste of something before asking them to buy it survived.

We got demos. We got downloadable games. We got digital storefronts.

And eventually, we got downloadable content.

Now DLC itself isn't a bad thing. There's a huge difference between buying a

game and six months later getting a substantial new expansion with new characters,

new locations, new stories or an entirely new experience.

That's additional content.

It's something that didn't exist when you bought the original game.

But somewhere along the way another version of DLC appeared.

And that's where things get a little more complicated.

Because that can feel less like here's something new we've made and more like

here's something we've already made.

You can have it if you pay us again.

This is where modern games can feel very different from these old shareware games.

You can spend a significant amount of money buying a game at launch and then

discover there's a whole ecosystem of additional purchases sitting around it.

Extra characters, extra modes, deluxe editions, premium currencies,

cosmetic items, additional missions.

Features that are advertised as part of a more expensive version.

And again, none of these things are automatically bad. Games are expensive to

make, and developers need to make money.

Ongoing development costs money. Expansion packs cost money.

The problem comes when the player starts to feel like they're being charged

to unlock pieces of something they thought they'd already bought.

And that's a very different relationship.

But with Shareware, the incomplete version was the invitation.

You got something first, you played it, and then you decided whether it was worth paying for.

With some modern games, the feeling can be almost reversed. You've already paid

and now you're standing in front of a series of locked doors,

seeing what's behind them, but you need to pay again.

And I don't think the answer is simply that companies became greedy. That's too easy.

The economics of making games changed enormously. Development teams got bigger,

budgets became enormous, games more complicated, and online services became part of the product.

And players changed too. We became accustomed to games that lasted for years,

rather than a few weekends.

We expected new content, updates, online features, and games to keep evolving after launch.

The industry responded to what people were willing to buy. But something about

the relationship still changed.

Shareware was based on a simple personal proposition. I made this,

you can try it. If you think it's worth something, pay me.

Modern gaming, on the other hand, feels like a much more complicated proposition.

You bought this, here's everything else you could buy.

And I think that's why shareware is worth remembering. Not because it was perfect, it wasn't.

Not because everything was better in the 90s. It definitely wasn't.

But because it represented a kind of relationship between the person making

something and the person using it.

There was an assumption that the work itself could convince you of its value.

And that's why I want to come back to the little registration card.

It's such a small thing, a piece of paper with your name, your address and the name of the software.

And maybe a cheque tucked into an envelope.

But somewhere on the other side of that transaction was a person who had made

something and was waiting to see whether enough people thought it was worth paying for.

The registration card was proof that the system worked, because people chose to participate in it.

You weren't forced to register, you weren't locked out of the game until you

turned it over your credit card, and you didn't have to buy a premium edition

just to access something that was already sitting on the disc.

You played, you decided, and then you supported a creator if you wanted to.

And looking back at that, it feels almost quaint.

But I think it's also something that's worth holding on to, because technology

has made it incredibly easy to measure what we're willing to pay for.

It can track what we click, what we buy, what we almost buy,

what we play, how long we play it, and which locked door we're most likely to open.

Shareware, on the other hand, came from a time when the technology couldn't do any of that.

And maybe that's what I find most interesting about shareware.

We tend to remember it as an old way of distributing software.

Floppy disks, registration cards, magazine cover disks, little games that somehow

made their way around the world.

But underneath all of that was a really simple idea. Let people experience the

thing that you've made, then trust them to decide what it's worth.

Now that's not necessarily a better business model, and it's certainly not a

perfect one, but it created a particular feeling between creator and customer.

You weren't constantly being reminded that there was something else to buy.

You weren't necessarily being treated as a collection of future transactions.

You were being given something, And, if it mattered to you, you could give something back.

And that's why these old shareware games still feel different.

Not because they were free, not because they were games, but because somewhere

inside that little floppy disk

or registration card was an idea that feels increasingly unusual today.

The person who made this trusts me to see its value.

And maybe that's the real artifact. Not the software, not the floppy disk,

not even the registration card.

It's the relationship they represented.

A time when getting something for free didn't necessarily mean you were the product.

Sometimes it just meant somebody had made something they wanted you to try and

trusted you to decide what it was worth.

I'm Danny Brown and this is Artifacts.