“After we’ve recouped some of the costs of the initial server shutdown, it no longer seemed fair to ask money for a multiplayer game that’s essentially entirely operated by the community itself – while we could justify it by still occasionally patching the game when really major bugs appeared, this has become so uncommon that the justification has become thinner and thinner.
“Going free has been something that you’ve been asking for a while – understandably – and one of the main arguments was that it’s the only thing that’s standing in the way of a large player population. If this is really the case, then challenge accepted – impress me.”
Content retrieved from: https://massivelyop.com/2021/08/04/player-run-open-perpetuum-goes-fully-free-to-play-on-steam/.