A longstanding criticism of free-to-play games is that they’re not really, well, free. The name isn’t quite a misnomer, as you can play these games for free, but almost all of them try to sell value-added content to you every time you play them.
Microsoft’s Project Spark is one such game: you can download and play it for free right now, but if you want the full experience you’ll have to fork over money for paid DLC. That, however, is going to change next week. All paid Project Spark content will become free to new and existing users starting on October 5, Microsoft has announced.
“Project Spark’s goal has always been to empower creativity,” wrote Microsoft’s Rahul Sandil. “We’ve been an incubation engine for ideas from epic to artistic and we plan to continue doing so.”
Those ideas will increasingly come from the game’s user base moving forward, as “active feature development” has come to a close with the release of the final DLC pack this past Monday. Moving forward, Microsoft will focus on encouraging users to create more content and educating them on how to do so, according to a post on Reddit. And though the team will no longer be creating content, it plans to continue updating Project Spark.
Users can read up on the 46 soon-to-be-free DLC packs here.
Players who bought paid DLC, purchased a retail disc — Project Spark was only free when acquired digitally — and activated it via product key on or after July 28 and/or who have remaining in-game tokens will receive a refund in the form of a Microsoft Store credit within 30-60 days of October 5.
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