Maybe he thought about freemium?
That's the problem. There is no clear distinction between greatly different business models, names are used interchangeably even on Wikipedia.
I'd say
freemium is something with unlockable features/content. Not that different from the old shareware concept, when you were getting a functional product with some features/content not available untill you register it. Think
Wolfenstein 3D - fully working, but just one episode, pay if you want all 6.
Now, the confusing term
free-to-play is in wide use as it's just a marketing slogan, not really a business model name. Nicknamed
pay-to-win by players for a reason: to make any reasonable progress, you need constant investment of money. P2W offers temporary bonuses/perishable items, each of them costs money.
Can you see the difference? While
Kingdom Rush is "Freemium",
Evony is
"Microtransactions-paid Virtual Currency".
The latter model means there is no limit of how much money a gamer can invest in the game. This is because those virtual goods are consumable or time-limited (contrast this with one-time activation of permanent premium content). Games are designed from the ground-up with this in mind: player actions use up energy (want to play more? pay!), construction/training takes several hours (don't want to wait? pay!), best items cost special currency (don't want to grind for weeks? pay!).
Because there's
no limit on how much you can put into a single[!] game, some people go overboard; this creates problems similar to addiction to gambling. When it was still marginal, I thought this new phenomenon could be ignored. But regular game project are being changed into pay-to-win because of this dominating trend.
I'm strongly
against this "virtual currency" model because of those underlying dangers.
I tried to ask MobyGames to clearly group games using this model. Read articles on the subject, like this one:
http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/w...a-ghost-story/
I'm not a programmer (although I know the basics of C, Flash and so on), bottom line I'd have to team up with somebody... I got burned out and disenchanted, last time I wanted to make a game was 2-3 years ago...