Thoughts On Valve and Free to Play

Thoughts On Valve and Free to Play

There have been lots of rumours and tidbits of details about Valve goings on over the past few days, it all started with the apparent revelation that Valve will be attending GamesCom later this year in Germany. Rumours ran wild that Valve would be revealing DOTA2 or, say it quietly, maybe even details on the future of the Half-Life franchise.

We also saw some Steam oriented news with the first batch of Free to Play games appearing on Steam. This was a smart move on Valve’s part with Free to Play games becoming ever more popular and the chance to bring a wider audience to Steam isn’t something that they would ignore for long. Following on from Steam supporting Free to Play games was word that Doug Lombardi had revealed that Valve were currently working on a Free to Play title.

The most obvious conclusion which everyone jumped to was that Valve were working on making DOTA2 Free to Play, however more details have emerged linking Team Fortress 2 with a possible Free to Play model.

What should we make of all this? If we link the threads together you start to get an idea for where Valve are going with the whole Free to Play shindig. It seems like Valve are possibly going to flick the switch on turning Team Fortress 2 into a Free to Play title with in-game purchases like hats providing further revenue. I would foresee this change occurring with the release of the Meet the Medic video which is near judging from the bird on the TF2 blog. If this is a success, which I fully imagine it will be, it then makes sense for Valve to announce DOTA2 to be Free to Play at GamesCom.

Of course, this is all idle speculation, but by joining the dots together, you get an idea for where Valve may be going.

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