Steam Now Offering Free-To-Play Games

donniebaseball23 writes "Valve's digital Steam service is going strong with 30 million active accounts, and now the developer has further boosted its offerings by adding free-to-play titles. Steam is kicking off its support of the free-to-play model with five titles (which will include in-game Steam exclusives): Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online: Free for All, Global Agenda: Free Agent, and Alliance of Valliant Arms. Valve's support of free-to-play shows just how widely accepted it's become."

Re:Great catch!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone plays games off of Steam at all for that matter. Polish it and put lipstick on it all you want, but Steam is invasive DRM that creates an artificial necessity to have a worthless resource using program running in the background and an internet connection even for single player games.

Not a fan of the F2P business model

[Flipao]

This Penny Arcade strip [penny-arcade.com] pretty much sums it up for me.

Mainly because it's simply not free, yes you can enjoy the games to a certain extent without paying a penny, but they are designed to squeeze as much money out of you as possible and in the long term are far more expensive than purchasing a retail product upfront.

Turkish Delight (Remember Narnia!)

[Pepebuho]

This offer of Free games sounds just like Turkish Delights in Narnia. Steam does not care about the games, it is all about extending the DRM'd platform. The more people use Steam (and Steam's DRM) the more Steam can tell developers that to reach a sizeable market they have to be part of Steam and use Steam's DRM.

It's all about the platform and its network effects. The larger the platform, the more relevant it becomes, the worse off we will be (as someone who decided NOT to purchase Civ V just because it uses Steam's DRM.

Re:Not a fan of the F2P business model

[aiht]

This Penny Arcade strip [penny-arcade.com] pretty much sums it up for me. Mainly because it's simply not free, yes you can enjoy the games to a certain extent without paying a penny, but they are designed to squeeze as much money out of you as possible and in the long term are far more expensive than purchasing a retail product upfront.

My strategy to work around this problem is simple and (I think) effective:
Don't buy the extra stuff that costs money.

They're only more expensive than an upfront retail product if you actually spend that much money on them - the choice is yours.

Re:Turkish Delight (Remember Narnia!)

[twocows]

As someone who uses Steam and loves it (among the many who do), I would recommend you try the current version before you bash it. I don't care if it's DRM if it's DRM that makes it easy for me to play my games anywhere.

Least Disrupting DRM

[Dudibob]

I don't understand some of the hate here for Steam, sure I use it and may be a little bias but it is the least most disruptive DRM, you can take your games to a different PC if you want (all you need is a login) and is so easy to join in games with friends if they are already in a game.