Pay once (premium)

What you're actually buying

The complete game as shipped: the story, the levels and the modes, with no meter running afterwards. Any later extras are sold as clearly labelled add-ons, not as pieces you need to finish what you bought. Whether you truly own it depends on the shop: a cartridge or disc can be lent or resold, while a digital copy is usually a licence (see 'Licence, not a copy').

How it works

The sale is the whole transaction. The publisher is paid once, at the till (or, in Nintendo's NES-era system, once at the factory door), and nothing ties its income to how long you keep playing. That makes pay-once the baseline everything else is measured against: when the only way to sell the next game is quality, the design's job is to be worth the money. The costs are a high upfront price and no safety net if the game is poor. A ROM cartridge had no writable memory, so a game shipped finished or it didn't ship. Digital stores and patches loosened that, and the used-game shelf, DLC and online passes were the industry's attempts to earn from a pay-once game after the sale.

When it's fine

Almost always. The price is visible, the end is in sight, and a good game sells by word of mouth. The healthiest version ships complete, works offline and says plainly that there are no in-game purchases.

Where it came from

The first home consoles (1972 to 1977) were the game itself: the Magnavox Odyssey ($99.95, 1972) and Atari's Home Pong ($98.95 through Sears, Christmas 1975) had fixed circuits that played built-in games and nothing else, until a cheap single chip and a price war crashed the segment by 1977-78. Splitting the box from the game gave the cartridge: the Atari 2600 launched in 1977 at $199.99 with Combat in the box, then earned on $30 cartridges bought one at a time. With no quality gate the market flooded with shovelware (rushed, low-quality games), and US revenue fell from around $3.2 billion in 1983 to about $100 million by 1985. Nintendo's licensing rules and lockout chip (which stopped unlicensed games from running) answered the crash and produced the 'complete game': Super Mario Bros. 3 sold about 17.28 million cartridges with no recurring revenue. On PC, floppy disks were cheap enough that Zork I at $39.95 paid for itself in one sale (it shipped in a ziplock bag), and SimCity could ship with no win condition because the sale was already made. The Game Boy (1989) shrank the deal to a pocket, discs (from 1995) put the budget into spectacle at a $49.99 price tag, Steam (2003) and indie developers made it digital and cheap, and the 99-cent App Store gold rush (2008) hit a price floor and lost mobile to 'free'. From about 2015 studios began to make 'no microtransactions' a selling point.

Historical prices and revenues are in US dollars at the time unless marked A$.