Speaking of which - how many people are going to want to go and stump up £30 for something like Brink when they could have TF2 for free? Valve’s game has always cast a tall shadow, and far from being rendered tawdry or being an admission of defeat by the move to play, it’s just gotten taller. Team Fortress 2 already puts most multiplayer shooters to shame: think how fearsome an opponent it must be for anyone planning a free to play one, where budgets and investments aren’t always the equal of their retail peers. All of a sudden, there’s a properly high-end, high-budget shooter out there for free, which means whoever tries to saunter along with their own offering sometime soon - for instance Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon project or PlanetSide Next - no longer has the open goal they once might have done. We've seen various efforts in this field previously, but they've tended towards either the casual or the retro. The other reason for the free-to-playisation, I half suspect, is getting there before someone else did. Neither of these would have been popular with the fanbase (which isn’t the same as saying the fanbase wouldn’t have bought them, of course.
Is team fortress 2 free upgrade#
Some four years down the line, ongoing sales of the game were surely pretty minimal, making the only real options to restore Team Fortress’s big money-making potential either to move onto a sequel or larger, paid upgrade packs. While superficially a bit of a shock (albeit one a few people guessed), at the same time it makes perfect sense. Team Fortress 2 has gone free to play, in a typically Valvian rug-from-under-our-feet move.