Sound crazy? The idea comes from the Game Developers Conference, during an "Indie Soapbox" where developers took the stage to talk about indie game development. Ben Foddy, who is behind the ever-ridiculous QWOP, had some out-there ideas about how people pay for games—but that's what makes them rad.
Take the idea of not having to pay for a game if you play it well enough, for example—he calls it the "reward model." Not keen on that? What about only having to pay if you absolutely sucked at a game?
These are but two ideas that he threw out, but they're the most interesting ones—they're the models that show "free-to-play" doesn't have to exist in the way that we typically experience it. People sometimes wince when they hear the term; people assume there's always a catch to free to play. Or worse, there's always the fear it's really just pay-to-win. But who knows, the way we pay for games now might not be the way we pay for games tomorrow.