Valve Has No Plans to Charge For Downloadables 98
In an interview with Eurogamer about the upcoming Team Fortress 2, Valve's Robin Walker discusses Valve's philosophy when it comes to downloadable content. In short, when you buy a game from them you buy 'all of it', even the downloadable maps that will be released after the game launches. "'[In multiplayer games] the content you're playing is being created by the players you're playing against, so the more people that get into the game, the more content you're going to have,' Valve's Charlie Brown concurred. Valve's strategy is roughly in line with the traditional PC model, but in recent years services like Xbox Live Marketplace have popularised microtransactions as a means of continuing to extract development capital from completed games." Relatedly, the company annouced last week that there will be no Black Box release for Half-Life 2, Episode 2. The original plan was to have a retail release of just the three new games (Episode 2, Portal, and TF2); now only the orange box with the complete HL2 experience will be available on store shelves. Gamers can still purchase the new content separately from the Steam service.
Re:No thanks, Valve. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pricing on new content? (Score:5, Informative)
You can download your games as many times as you like, on to as many machines as you like. Technically, you can only have a Steam account active on a single machine at a time, but you could probably fudge your way round it with use of the offline mode which is invoked if no network connection is present.
You can also manually copy game data files between machines - if you've forgotten anything, it'll get redownloaded when Steam reconnects and does a file check on game startup. There's also a function built-in for neatly archiving files into CD or DVD-sized chunks, and restoring them accordingly.
Yes, ideally you do have to connect to Valve's servers every time Steam starts up (where it'll download any game updates unless told otherwise) - so if Valve and/or Steam were to mysteriously disappear, then you'd be stuck either with offline mode or with none of your games working. Valve persons have indicated that in such an eventuality a final, check-disabling update would be a nice thing to do, barring any particularly severe catastrophes.
It's not brilliant, and the need-to-authenticate-online thing has drawn a lot of criticism, but it's pretty cool once you get the hang of it. Plus the catalogue of third-party games keeps on increasing - there's a nice little line in critically-acclaimed, market-ignored titles like Psychonauts available. I'd recommend it for that alone.