TF2: Meet the Medic and from now on Free2Play

In times of bullshit-bingoing big publishers Valve comes again to save the day.

Today, the Meet The Medic video has been released. The Meet The … videos are a series of rendered movies introducing the characters of Team Fortress 2. They have always been of high quality and humour. And this one disappoints neither.

Along with the, from the community long awaited, video release comes a big update with a lot of new items and features. Again, this is not something new to Valve. They have been updating Team Fortress 2 ever since release, with medium, big and very big updates.

But what I was actually trying to get to, and why it is such a good move: Team Fortress 2 will be Free To Play from now on!

So, why is this such a good decision? Not only for the community and players, who can finally try and play it without having to buy it and those who already own it get new friends and enemies to play with, as well as can get others to play along more easily (“Come on, play with me. Just try it. You can download it for free!”).

Valve on the other hand has had constant good sales, because of their continued promotion, support and updates. Some time ago they released an in-game store as an experiment. Although the items are really over-priced they probably make some (good) money with it. Now with making the game free to play get an even broader player-base of potential in-game-store customers. In a time where probably a very high percentage of the users willing to buy TF2 already bought it anyway, making it free is a great way to give player-numbers another big boost.

Clearly a win-win situation. And now go and download it! But make sure you get in there with a mindset of I will use whatever items I got at hand and find. Not having all the fancy items others have is ok. Because there will be fancy stuff (which you will eventually find as well.)