Brink has gone Free-to-Play, Suddenly

Hokay, so, who here remembers Brink? Because I sure as heck didn't before this nugget fell into my lap.

Basically, Brink was released back in 2011, a multiplayer shooter that tried, much in the way Titanfall 1 did, to seamlessly fuse a single-player story into a multiplayer experience. It's debatable how well it actually worked, but the game was never especially popular among the gaming public, and the developer, Splash Damage, seems to have moved on to other games, like their currently in-beta free-to-play title Dirty Bomb.

But this morning it was suddenly discovered that the once pay-to-play Brink has officially gone free-to-play, without any warning or fanfare. Typically that might be a bad thing, as it makes people who paid for the game feel rather cheated, but considering the game hasn't gotten support in years and basically, no one was playing it, you're not going to see that kind of outcry this go around.

It begs the question: why, though? Are they planning to start supporting it and try to encourage the growth of the people who've come back to it? Are they just doing it as a fun distraction? Will they change how the in-game marketplace works? I, like you, have no idea. But based on the fact there was basically no marketing for this movie, I'd say it'd be optimistic to think they're planning on doing anything else with this title.

Still, a free game is a free game, and if you wanted to check it out, now would be the time, given people will abandon it again fairly soon.