Category: Historical Articles
Chieftain Shorts – M1917
Incredibly Rare WW2 Tank Wreck Located
Russia’s BMPT: A Tank for Urban Warfare – The Future of Tank Combat?
WoWS – Naval Legends: The Fall of Destroyer Vittoria
Prizee: The French Flash portal so big it had its own themed restaurant and then sank hard
PS: Since today there are no news, I have decided to share an article about a lesser known F2P Flash games platform from the times before WoT, a place that I still miss to this day (including its spin-offs like Blobzone). You can find certain similarities with WG, such as „friendly” gambling. All in all an interesting read, I hope. You can also read our 5 year old article about Club Penguin’s death.
We cannot deny the link between the boom of free-to-play games and the democratization of Internet access. Since they were free content on the Internet, people tried to find ways to monetize them, and naturally this extended to videogames. Many companies attempted to make profits out of free games (see my article about Studio Tanuki), and often ended up going out of business without making any impact on the cultural landscape whatsoever.
But, in the pioneering years of the Internet, there were one website that managed to stay online for almost two decades, still is remembered to this day, and changed the Internet as a whole: Prizee
If you were a French-speaking teenager during the first half of the 2000s, you have certainly already heard of Prizee. It was the biggest free gaming website of its era, gathering an immense community of players around addictive Flash games, kid-friendly mascots and intricate monetization systems. Years before the debates about microtransactions and loot boxes, this website made literally millions of euros out of free-to-play games promising physical rewards to players.