Valve Has No Plans to Charge For Downloadables

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.

[cliffski]

you won't be missed, because the gains they get from online registration in terms of reduction in casual piracy far outweighs the 0.01% of their audience who feel the way you do.

Re:No thanks, Valve.

[Hydryad]

You know what, steam is possibly one of the best systems I have used. I mean seriously, there is absolutely no problems with reinstalling games you own, using games you own.. there has yet to be a day where I was unable to play my games on steam. Saying steam should not be used for distribution is a lot like saying that CD drives are evil and should not be allowed. I presume that you think 'registering with the mothership' by making a steam account, which as far as I recall does not even require personal information, is a horrible thing. This is the best implementation of a next gen distribution system I can conceive. I simply do not get why so many people bring so much hate against it.

Re:No thanks, Valve.

[Nos.]

Anytime there is an article having anything to do with Valve, there's always a couple of you that feel the need to complain about Steam. Guess what... we all know there are a few of you who don't like it. Fine, we get it. Its not going anywhere. The number of people who like Steam far outweigh you.

Personally, an agent that keeps my games up to date, lets me purchase new hardware, and reduces the number of cheaters out there is something I like. I don't care if it authenticates my copy of HL2. Go ahead, I paid for it, it doesn't impact my experience negatively at all.

I can still play offline. I don't have to let it update games as soon as a patch is released. I don't have to run it all the time. I can play games offline.

Re:No thanks, Valve.

[fistfullast33l]

Plus, it allows Valve to sleep at night while I don't have to deal with a monstrosity like Starforce [glop.org], which acts as a device driver and really screws up your CD and DVD ROM drives. I think Starforce is ten times worse than anything Sony did for anti-piracy, hands down.

Re:No thanks, Valve.

[Broken scope]

Valve is working on a way to fix that by using guest passes.

Re:No thanks, Valve.

[randyest]

Interesting anecdote. This has never happned to me, even when steam is down, so I guess my anecdote cancels out yours.