Stores use the word "free" for several completely different deals. A game can be free to keep, free for a weekend, included in a subscription catalogue, offered as a limited trial, or built as a free-to-play game from the start.
The price on the button may be zero in every case. What happens next is not.
Free to keep: claim the licence during the window
Epic Games Store's weekly giveaways are the cleanest example. Epic's support documentation says a featured free game is available to claim for a limited period and, once claimed, stays on the account.
The important action is claiming it before the deadline. You do not have to finish the game, or even install it, while the promotion is live.
This is why a weekly Epic giveaway is different from a temporary access event. The promotion ends; the claimed licence remains in the library.
Free weekend: full access with an expiry date
Steam's Free Weekend documentation describes a different model. A developer can make the full game playable for a limited promotional period. When that period ends, continued access requires a purchase.
The game may still appear in parts of your library history, and save data can remain, but the temporary event did not grant permanent ownership.
That makes a free weekend useful for deciding whether the full game is worth buying, especially for multiplayer games where a demo would not reproduce the real experience. It is not a giveaway.
Demo or trial: a deliberately limited sample.
A demo usually contains only part of a game, while a timed trial can provide the full game for a limited number of hours. The exact restrictions are set by the publisher or platform.
PlayStation Plus Deluxe, for example, includes game trials as a distinct benefit from its Game Catalogue and Monthly Games. That naming difference is useful: "trial" is a test period, not a licence to the full game forever.
Progress may carry into a purchase in some games, but that is a title-specific feature. Check before assuming it does.
Subscription catalogue: access depends on two clocks
PlayStation Plus Extra and Deluxe provide access to a rotating Game Catalogue. Sony says catalogue games can have end dates when they leave the service.
That means access depends on both the player's subscription remaining active and the game remaining in the relevant catalogue.
PlayStation Plus Monthly Games work slightly differently. Sony says claimed Monthly Games can be played while the membership is active. They stay associated with the member's collection after the claim month, but an active membership is still required to play them.
Those two PlayStation Plus models are both subscription benefits, yet even they have different rules. This is why "it was free on PS Plus" is too vague to answer whether you still have access.
Free-to-play: the base game itself has no purchase price.
Games such as Apex Legends and Fortnite use another model again. The base game can be downloaded without buying a licence or subscribing to a catalogue.
Free-to-play does not mean every item inside the game is free. Cosmetics, passes, expansions or currency can still cost money. The point is that the base game's access is not a temporary promotion.
On PlayStation, Sony notes that most free-to-play games also do not require PlayStation Plus for online multiplayer, unlike most paid online games.
Ask one question before clicking
When a storefront says "free," ask: what condition ends my access?
If the answer is "nothing after I claim it," it is a giveaway. If the answer is "Sunday night," it is temporary access. If it is "when my subscription ends or the catalogue rotates," it is a subscription licence. If it is "after two hours," it is a trial. If the base game simply costs zero, it is free-to-play.
That small check prevents the most common disappointment: downloading something called free and discovering later that the zero-dollar button was describing access, not ownership.
Reporting notes