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No problem. I can understand asking. It's simply common usage, and it's accepted by basically everyone outside of a few hobbyists. I ran a roundtable recently at the largest game developers conference in the world (10,000+ games industry people), for instance, full of professionals from every walk of the games industry entitled "Free-to-play, pay for virtual assets." Nobody, in three sessions of the roundtable and hundreds of participants in total, had a problem with calling the model free to play. The Federal Trade Commission doesn't have a problem with it (and you're on a site regulated by them). Google doesn't have a problem with it. It's just how it is. If these guys want to invent their own term, that's fine, but what free means is well-understood and well-accepted, and we're not going to change just because a few people don't like it.
It's not just the games industry either, I might add. Common usage of the word free permits "buy one, get one free", in which case you -have- to buy something to get something else for free (in our games, you don't have to buy anything, ever. You could play 24/7 and never buy a thing). You can argue that's deceptive, etc etc, but at the end of the day, the rest of the country and world understands just what it means.
--matt
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