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.

Pricing on new content?

[Canthros]

So, have they made any announcement with respect to Steam-only pricing of Episode 2, Portal, or Team Fortress 2?

Multiplayer expansions don't work well...

[RichPowers]

Not everyone buys "booster packs" and expansions for multiplayer games. This forces many servers to keep new maps out of rotation. Consequently, new maps are limited to a few dedicated "NEW MAP!!!" servers, some of which are located in different continents. I noticed this with Battlefield 1942 in particular. Its two expansions were solid, but, if I remember correctly, only a small handful of servers had the new maps. Because of this, I was never compelled to buy an expansion that few people actually played online, especially if I was dependent on just one server. Contrast this with the free maps DICE/EA gave us. Battlefield 42's Coral Sea map is still played today, oftentimes with a full 32 players. Everyone downloaded the map because it was freely included with a new patch. The great thing about free multiplayer content: everyone gets it, so it'll actually be played online.

Re:No thanks, Valve.

[Chabo]

Feel free to play in offline mode, so you don't have to authenticate. Personally, I'd rather give up a few of my rights in this particular area in order to play on nearly cheat-free servers. Remember how CS got its reputation for hackers? That was back in the days of WON and VAC1. Now with Steam and VAC2, I don't really see that, but I still do in other games, like Q3A, COD, etc.