For all the avid gamers out there who had been hooked up to the popular game DOTA, good news are here. According to the co-founder of Valve, the developer company of this game, Gabe Newell, DOTA 2 will be free-to-play though ‘with a twist.’
What exactly will be the ‘twist’ in the free-game model is rather unclear. When probed further as to what did he mean by his statement, Newell stated, ‘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.’
In a world which is fast moving towards freemium models, a free DOTA 2 means a lot. The franchise has been wildly popular and its sequel will have lots of followers anyway.
Apparently, Valve is working on a model which is not currently existent. It really is going to be surprise since Valve intends to ‘reward’ players for the good they do through the game.
While Newell wasn’t too clear about it, he did tell that, ‘We’re trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else [are] 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.’
For instance, a player who acts as a useful guide or helps other players in training for the game, will be ‘rewarded’ for being so. That is an interesting concept but we still don’t understand how Valve intends to monetize it. It seems to do something with providing the ability to ‘redeem’ expertise credits across multiple games. That may not be so but that’s what Newell seems to be hinting.
According to him, ‘In a sense, think of individual games as instance dungeons of a larger experience, if that makes sense as a concept.’ While things are still more vague than clear, we sure are excitedly anticipating the launch of the game to have an (hopefully) all-new experience.
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