In Defense of Free-to-Play and Free-to-Use software.

     Bartosz Milewski once mentioned that advertising and the software engineering behind it actually points to things of real value, like beer.

    The ontology of software is different than other things. They have no mass and fundamentally no scarcity, the fundamental economic problem that all business hangs on. Software is infinite in supply, and so ultimately worthless. At the same time, making software costs money. 

    So how then should the craft be funded? One is the religion model, also known was Free-and-Open Source. Contribute to software you will use yourself and you have the incentive to make the best you can. 

    Another structure is advertising. FaceBook, Google, and Twitter are advertising corporations, free use with only the cost of slight inconvenience via advertising. Public relations may be a deviously evil industry, but if they point to a real object, they are supporting real work. 

    Video games consoles are  expensive ripoffs with no consideration to preservation. They take up space in rooms, and it is not efficient to own them. It is better to consume video games on desktop or phone distribution systems. Phones are the biggest consumer base. Development should logically follow to there. That development should be paid by giant corporations advertising their junk food, not the consumer wasting their time. Video games and even free-to-use software like the Google suite are then not non-volatile unchanging objects like old video game ROMs. They are more like historical events. Not sustainable for the preservation of the software itself, but this is what pays real software engineering. 

    It can be ethically done. Don't charge, advertise.