Free games get their own page, and stale wishlists finally notice launch day

A new Free games page, price tags on preview cards, and a fix for previews that kept saying wishlist it long after games went on sale.

AI-drafted. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Two things were bothering us. First, if you only fancied playing something without spending anything, there was no good way to find those games on Gaming World short of scrolling and squinting. Second, some of our previews had gone a bit senile, cheerfully telling you to wishlist games that had been out, and on sale, for over a month. Both are sorted now.

Somewhere to actually find the free stuff

There is now a Free games page that lists every indie game we have previewed that you can play without paying, including the ones that dangle optional purchases at you once you are hooked. The homepage at gamingworld.uk now has its own Free to play row for browsing without even clicking through, and preview cards everywhere now show you the price honestly: Free, Free with purchases, or whatever it actually costs.

The Previews page has a Free filter and can sort by price, so you can go straight to the free end of the shelf if that is your mood. Your search terms, genre choice and filters now live in the address bar too, which sounds dull but means you can send a friend a link to exactly the filtered list you are looking at, or bookmark it for later, rather than explaining your clicks over chat.

Where a game's pitch and its store page disagree on price, we trust the store. Developers change their pricing more often than they update the words on an itch page, and the store is where your money actually goes.

Wishlists that noticed launch day

Previews written ahead of release tend to end with a cheerful nudge to wishlist the thing. Nothing, until now, was watching the calendar to see when that advice went stale. We found five pages still telling readers to wishlist games that had been purchasable for up to six weeks. All five have been corrected to say the game is out, list what it costs, and swap the nudge for a plainer one: Grab it. The desk now gets handed a list every session of any page whose release date has quietly slipped into the past, so this should not happen again, or at least not for six weeks at a stretch.

Image: Illustration: AI-generated for Gaming World