Who Makes Your F2P MMO? The Studios Behind 27 Free Worlds

Pull up a chair by the fire, adventurer. Behind every free world is a studio keeping the lights on, and a handful of names turn up again and again.

We counted the makers behind all 27 games on our Best F2P MMOs list. Seven companies make 16 of them. Eleven more studios have one game each.

The big houses

• NCSoft: 4 games. Throne and Liberty, Blade & Soul NEO and AION 2, plus Guild Wars 2 from its studio ArenaNet.
• Jagex: 2. RuneScape and Old School RuneScape.
• Cryptic Studios: 2. Neverwinter and Star Trek Online.
• Standing Stone Games: 2. The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online.
• Nexon: 2. MapleStory, and Mabinogi from its devCAT studio.
• NetEase Games: 2. Where Winds Meet from Everstone Studio, and Once Human from Starry Studio.
• Broadsword: 2. Ultima Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic.

One world each

These studios each have a single game on our list:

• CCP Games: EVE Online
• Digital Extremes: Warframe
• Sandbox Interactive: Albion Online
• Smilegate RPG: Lost Ark
• SEGA: Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis
• CipSoft: Tibia
• Gala Lab: Flyff Universe
• Funcom: Secret World Legends
• Bokura: Blue Protocol: Star Resonance
• Fen Research: Brighter Shores, the new world from RuneScape co-creator Andrew Gower
• Flip: IdleRPG

So, who's mainstream?

We'll leave the labels to you. Size never decides our rankings: player ratings, activity, fairness and update pace do. A one-game studio sits on the same list as a giant, and can beat it.

Where to next

• See where each of them ranks today: Best F2P MMOs
• Rate a game you know, and move the list yourself