Steam has been a terrific digital download service for players looking to buy both games at full price and games on the cheap. However, If you're the kind of game player for whom buying games "on the cheap" is still too expensive (or you live in a territory where retail sales aren't feasible in the market) then Steam has been ill-equipped to deliver the kinds of games you want to play.
Never one to let any potential PC revenue stream slip them by, Valve has announced that, as of today, Steam will support the release and distribution of Free-to-Play games in addition to the paid games already available from the service. With this new update, players can not only download F2P games from Steam, but also purchase each game's microtransactions from the Steam Client itself.
Along with the initial announcement, Valve revealed the first five F2P games available on the service. The first run of games are Sega's Spiral Knights, Cryptic's Champions Online, Hi-Rez Studio's Global Agenda, Perfect World's Forsaken World, and NHN's Alliance of Valiant Arms.
It's interesting to see Valve expanding on the types of payment structures it's willing to integrate and support through the actual Steam client. Thanks to games like Team Fortress 2, players on the PC are more used to purchasing the kinds of vanity/functional items that have been the lifeblood of other F2P games. Hell, it's possible that adding this kind of support to Steam paves the way for Valve to release Team Fortress 2 as a free multiplayer shooter supported solely by microtransactions. We'll find out more of what Valve has planned soon, as additional information on Steam's F2P integration will be revealed in the coming days.
Sounds awesome
Go Champs!
A brilliant move to expand your Steam installation base, which will make future purchases when those oh-so-hard-to-resist deals funnel through.
Spiral Knights is fun, Champions Online is complete rubbish, can't speak for the rest since i have never played them.
I love the idea of steam putting the free micro transaction games on their service :)
Steam is boss. Games for Windows Live and that new Origin thing can go die in a corner.
Agreed. If they can actually sell those awful TF2 microtransaction items, there's obviously a market for such things in "free" games. I always thought such things were garbage, but perhaps all they needed was a centralized location with a pre-existing install base.
No interest in the shooters tho
@Styl3s: Champions Online is bad, but believe me; that game gets WAY BETTER when you don't have to pay for it,
What's Steafm?
Also you used 'than' instead of 'then'.
And 'additional' instead of 'addition'.
If Valve released TF2 as a free to play game, I would be PISSED. I paid for that game because I wanted the game as it was when I bought it. To find out that it went F2P, while it makes a certain degree of sense given how fucked up that game is at the present moment, would make me feel really under appreciated as a customer.
"Perfect World's Forsaken World"
Wait what
Anyway, excited to see Firefall show up on this eventually since that's the only F2P game I'm anticipating
Typo in the first paragraph. Should be "then Steam" I think.
@MattBodega said:
I sank a lot of hours into it, the best thing about the game is character customization.