pay to win
pay to win adjective: designed in such a way as to allow players to exchange real-world currency for in-game benefits.
Adjective
pay to win (comparative more pay to win, superlative most pay to win)
- Designed in such a way as to allow players to exchange real-world currency for in-game benefits.
- Concerns about pay-to-win dynamics are laced through core games, as the default norm is that superior players should win battles contested on a level playing field.2020, Christopher A. Paul, Free-to-Play: Mobile Video Games, Bias, and Norms, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 59
- Admittedly, the loot boxes first of all monetize video games, by reinforcing the pay-to-win logic, but they also contribute to their gamblification (Johnson 2018), […]2021, Stéphane Le Lay, Emmanuelle Savignac, Jean Frances, Pierre Lénel, editors, The Gamification of Society, volume 2, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 107
Noun
pay to win (uncountable)
- The ability and/or practice of exchanging real-world currency for an in-game benefit.
Forms of pay to win
| comparative | more pay to win |
|---|---|
| superlative | most pay to win |
| alternative form | pay-to-win |
| alternative form | P2W |
Questions about pay to win
- What does pay to win mean?
- Pay to win means designed in such a way as to allow players to exchange real-world currency for in-game benefits.
- What part of speech is pay to win?
- Pay to win can be an adjective or a noun.
Words near pay to win in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pay to win (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-pay to win.wav.
Cite this entry: “pay to win.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pay_to_win. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.