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Free-To-Play Games Now Available Through Steam

by on June 14, 2011
 

Everybody likes free stuff right? Who doesn’t? Not many things in this world are free and gamers such as ourselves often find ourselves with nothing new to play and no money to cure the urge. In recent years that has slowly been changing, with the advent of the free-to-play model, and now it looks like one of the games industry’s big dogs have just stepped into the arena.

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises and leading technologies, today introduced support for Free to Play (F2P) Games on Steam with the launch of five F2P games.

Available immediately, the launch titles are Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online: Free for All, Global Agenda: Free Agent, and Alliance of Valliant Arms (AVA).

Beginning tomorrow (Wednesday) with Spiral Knights and concluding Sunday with AVA, each of the five launch titles will offer exclusive in-game content to those who try the “F2P game of the day” on Steam. In game transactions in all of the titles will be supported by Steam’s micro-transaction backend system that is available to Steamworks partners and currently used in Valve’s Team Fortress 2.

“The introduction of Free to Play games is another example of the constant evolution of Steam,” said Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve. “Free to Play games offer new game genres and game experiences for customers, while offering developers and publishers new revenue opportunities and the ability to reach customers in areas of the world where the traditional packaged goods model is less popular than F2P.”

Specific details on the F2P games of the day and their exclusive in-game content will be made available in the coming days.