Tag Archives | Valve

The free to play gaming craze has suddenly swept through some major players in the video game industry.

Valve announced that its popular first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 will now be free forever through the company’s Steam PC gaming service, with some optional premium perks for players who spend money on anything in the game. This is part of Valve’s of larger effort to bring free-to-play games to the Steam service.

But Valve is hardly going against the grain here. Last month, Ubisoft announced its first free-to-play foray with Ghost Recon Online. Electronic Arts, which has dabbled in freemium for years now, added its popular Battlefield franchise to the mix this year with Battlefield Play4Free. In March, Sony’s Free Realms became the first free-to-play title for a home game console.

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Steam is a popular gaming service for PCs with over 30 million player accounts worldwide, but it’s missing out on the huge audience that prefers video game consoles and gaming in the living room.

That may change with a couple of new efforts from Valve, which runs the Steam service. The company announced that it’s building a “big picture mode” with controller support and navigation designed for big screens. Valve’s intent is to help gamers play from their couches without a mouse and keyboard.

In addition, Valve is bringing a version of Steam to the Playstation 3, starting with the release of Portal 2 in April. This will allow PC and PS3 gamers to play together, and may someday allow players to resume their saved games across both platforms.

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