As the popularity and speed of internet connections rose, so did the popularity of using the internet for digital distribution of media. User-created game mods and maps were distributed exclusively online, as they were mainly created by people without the infrastructure capable of distributing the content through physical media.

The majority of such content was available for free, and the phrase "downloadable content" is rarely used to refer to such content, instead being termed "user-created content" and or "mods", for example, the Spring game engine has many downloadable content under both free and proprietary licenses.