The PlayBound Bar
Free games are not scarce. There are tens of thousands of them, and most are not worth your evening. What is scarce is a trustworthy answer to which ones are actually good.
So PlayBound is deliberately small. A game earns a place here only if it clears all five criteria below — and we publish them so you can check our judgement against a stated standard rather than taking it on trust.
- 1
Genuinely free
No trial, no paywalled campaign, no pay-to-win, no cosmetic treadmill. Free means free, forever.
- 2
Finished enough to enjoy
Playable and satisfying start to finish today — not a promising alpha you should check back on.
- 3
Actively maintained
A release or meaningful commit within the last twelve months. Someone is still looking after it.
- 4
Stands on its own merits
Good enough that we would recommend it even if it cost money. Free is not the reason it is here.
- 5
Won't disappear
Open-source or self-hostable, so no shutdown, delisting or licence expiry can take it away from you.
What this rules out
Plenty of well-known free games fail this standard, and that is the point. A game funded by a battle pass fails criterion one. A promising early-access project fails criterion two. An abandoned 2011 release fails criterion three. A game that is only interesting because it is free fails criterion four. And any live-service title whose servers can be switched off fails criterion five — which is most of the free games you have heard of.
18 games have been assessed against the bar so far, each with a visible verdict and verification date on its page.
Questions
What does PlayBound mean by 'genuinely free'?
No trial period, no paywalled campaign, no pay-to-win purchases, and no cosmetic treadmill designed to extract money over time. If any part of the game a reasonable player would consider core is behind a payment, it does not qualify. Free-to-play games funded by monetisation pressure are excluded even when technically free to download.
Why does PlayBound have so few games?
Because the catalog is the recommendation. Adding a mediocre game to reach a bigger number would weaken the only thing that makes the list useful. Every title is here because it individually cleared all five criteria — comprehensiveness is not a goal.
How often is the standard re-checked?
Each game carries a last-verified date shown on its page. Maintenance status in particular is re-checked, because a project that was active last year may not be active now. If a game stops meeting the bar, that is recorded rather than hidden.
What does 'won't disappear' mean?
The game is open-source or self-hostable, so no company decision — a shutdown, a delisting, a licence expiry, a server switch-off — can take it away from you. This is the one criterion no commercial free-to-play game can satisfy, and it is why the catalog skews open-source.
Does a game have to be open-source to be listed?
Not strictly. The requirement is that it cannot be taken away, which in practice usually means open-source or self-hostable. A genuinely free, permanently downloadable game with no monetisation could qualify without being open-source.
Who decides?
PlayBound's editors. The criteria are published here precisely so the judgement can be checked against a stated standard rather than taken on trust. Each game page shows which criteria it met and when that was last verified.