Free-to-play articles

World of Warcraft is considered a massive success, yet it's dwarfed by World of Tanks' 1 million concurrent players and 75 million total users. You can also find more than half a million people playing Dota 2 on any given day and League of Legends has over 7.5 million players online during peak hours.

While you may not need a Radeon R9 290X or a GeForce GTX 780 Ti to get the most out of these games, we're curious to see how hard those titles can push today's hardware.

Fans of the original flower defense game were understandably miffed when they discovered the official follow-up would be launching exclusively on iOS, but what really worried folks was the "free-to-play" business. Luckily, Plants Vs. Zombies takes a different approach to in-app purchases than most mobile games.

Rather than alienating fans of the original game by locking content behind pay walls or dumbing-down gameplay for more casual players, Plants Vs. Zombies 2 is only going after players who lack the patience or skill to make it through the game on their own.

The gaming world is making a dramatic shift towards free to play games. Of course, full price retail titles still make up for a majority of releases on the PC and most other platforms, but playing a quality game without cracking your wallet open is a completely viable option nowadays.

A free to play game made right should allow players to enjoy everything it has to offer, while keeping monetary transactions completely optional. We've combed through the Internet to bring you the very best PC games pushing forward the free-to-play model – and making a good name for it, too.