Newell Teases Dota 2 as "Free-to-Play" but with a "Twist"

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  • Shawn Zipay
    Managing Communities 24/7
    • Apr 2003
    • 69279

    #1

    Newell Teases Dota 2 as "Free-to-Play" but with a "Twist"

    Again, more information coming in today from the audio interview between Valve's Gabe Newell and Seven Day Cooldown. This time, the news concerns Dota 2 and how Newell claims that the payment structure for the game has never before been attempted.

    What does that mean? Well, right now your guess is as good as ours. The Newell said that it will be "free to play" but with a "twist."

    "It’s going to be free-to-play — it’ll have some twists, but that’s the easiest way for people to think about it.

    The issue that we’re struggling with quite a bit is something I’ve kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people’s contributions to a community? We’re trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else recognized and accommodated. We all know people where if they’re playing we want to play, and there are other people where if they’re playing we would [rather] be on the other side of the planet. It’s just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people.


    Newell continues on to say that they would like to try rewarding players who exhibit positive behaviors. Teach someone the ropes in game and be rewarded for it. It sounds great, right? Sure, but Newell says that sort of system is really hard to reliably track.

    When you start thinking about the different games that people play and you try to think about how people can create value or a service in one game and benefit somebody in a different game, you can start to see how the different games sort knit together.

    How somebody who really likes Team Fortress 2 can still be creating value for somebody who is playing DOTA 2 or Skyrim, or if somebody is a creator in one space how it can translate into another. In a sense, think of individual games as instance dungeons of a larger experience, if that makes sense as a concept.


    While that may not have cleared anything up at all, it is good to take away from this that Valve is looking towards Dota 2 being a F2P title. It's that little extra "twist" that might hold the key to how the game will be monetized. I'm sure their plans will start to make sense as the months go on.
  • K-16
    ...
    • Sep 2026
    • 2018

    #2
    My assumption is that VALVe's focus is not on rewarding players who financially support the game through virtual asset sales ("freemium"). I believe the twist is about rewarding players who support the longetivity and popularity of the game through helping the community maintain growth. Simply put, I imagine DOTA 2 will have players with cool items/upgrades because they referred their friends to stay in the game for more than a month (or perhaps to level 5 a la Tribes: Ascend), or because they acted as guides (a la TF2) helping newbies not feel like they entered an old-generation arcade community full of sexual harrassment and judgemental attitudes. (That's right, I'm beating a super dead horse, because I'm an idiot when it comes to zingers.)

    So if you want the cool stuff without grinding, then make the environment fun to play in by bringing in and helping people who can make DOTA 2 fun and welcoming to play. Mind you, I'm sure there will be separate communities for competitive and casual players, because if I learned anything from Natural-Selection (or League of Legends for a more relevant example), it's that you can't blend the two together for very understandable reasons.

    VALVe also benefits with more psychological profiling data (does nobody care that VALVe plays Big Brother because they're benevolent and transparent in their work?), while reducing workload as we are now responsible (for those who want cool items that is) for moving players into games with people who share similar interests/play-styles. Normally, VALVe has to do 100% of the work by messing with the matchmaking system and moving groups of players around to reduce rage-quitting. Now, we can point someone in the right direction in DOTA2 and get a cool item in return.

    Or... It could be none of that and the twist is something else. D'oh! Wall of text in vain for the lose...

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