Team Fortress 2 Releases The ‘Uber’ Update; Becomes Free to Play

Shortly after launching the first several free-to-play games on Steam, Valve has added one more to the list: Team Fortress 2. While this won’t come as a surprise to some given the notoriously steep discounts TF2 often received during frequent sales, until now the game has varied between the price of one or two Mann Co keys. As of today the keys still cost money along with everything else in the in-game Mann Co Store, but TF2 is now completely free to play, permanently.

The only possibly even better news, is that Thursday marked the launch of the surprise The Über Update, with the Medic, Soldier, Demo, Sniper, Spy, and Scout all receiving a diverse set of new class weaponry along with the addition of the pl_BarnBlitz map. Although only six classes are mentioned, we can confirm the Pyro received at least one new weapon as well, so others may be still be lurking waiting to be found.

Those wishing to learn more on the Über Update should get started over here and here for the scout update. Oh, did we forget to mention the Team Fortress 2 ‘Meet the Medic’ video is now out, too? And for those hardy veterans that bought TF2 sometime during the over four years it has been out, you will be receiving the iconic doughboy helmet.

Valve’s Mann Co Store has proven to be an overwhelming success so far and likely prompted this early announcement in the middle of an already free-to-play week for TF2. Supporting a free game purely from in-game micro-transactions is still a small but growing business model, but it does have one especially neat side effect. It solves one very large, longstanding problem that has plagued the PC gaming industry for years. Just think for a moment, if a game is free-to-play, then of what use is DRM – because game piracy wouldn’t even exist?

Nobody said creating a free-to-play game that can still generate sufficient revenue would be easy, but as a string of past games have shown, it is certainly possible. Developers may have to get creative inventing ways to entice users to pay for items in the otherwise free game, but as long as such items don’t give an undue advantage to a privileged few or result in a pay-to-win scenario, then it is pretty hard to find fault with the principle idea. We can honestly say we only hope more games will elect to follow suit.