Valve free-to-play game: "Yes," it's being worked on

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Valve VP of marketing, Doug Lombardi, has confirmed to French site Barre de Vie that Valve are working on a free-to-play game. When asked if Valve were working on their own free-to-play game, Lombardi simply replied "yes."

Then again, it could be something completely new. A while back Valve surprised everyone when they released Alien Swarm for nothing. There were no further updates to that game, but Valve have been gradually adding microtransactions into Team Fortress 2 over the course of the last year or so. It's a move that proved so successful they repeated it in Portal 2, offering players the chance to buy new skins and animations for the co-op bots Atlas and P-body.

A series of free-to-play games like Champions Online and Global Agenda recently hit Steam, another indication that Valve believe that free-to-play is going to be a big part of PC gaming's future. Lombardi told Barre de Vie, via translator, that “in "some areas of the world, free-to-play games are already paying more than traditional games.”

Earlier this year, Valve CEO Gabe Newell spoke to Develop about their change in design philosophy, saying that they're moving towards " shorter and shorter development cycles ." For more insight into the inner workings of the Valve hive-mind, check out our series of interviews with Gabe Newell .

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Tom Senior
Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.