http://blog.dota2.com/2012/06/introducing-the-dota-store/
DoTA 2 will be Free to Play. Yup. Awesome. From the horses mouth:
"Today we’re announcing that Dota 2 will be free to play, and contain an in-game store where you’ll be able to buy fancy gear to customize your heroes. From the forum threads we’ve read over the months since The International, it’s pretty clear that this won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone out there. There are a variety of smaller details that we’ve decided to put together a FAQ to help with, but we wanted to address the two most common concerns right away:
Dota 2 will not be a pay-to-win game. All the items in the store are cosmetic, and don’t affect gameplay.
All of the heroes will be available free of charge. We believe restricting player access to heroes could be destructive to game design, so it’s something we plan to avoid."
This really makes sense for this kind of game to be free to play. Having a large user base makes these kinds of games fun. Seems like they made money when Team Fortress 2 went free to play and DoTA 2 sounds like it could do very well too.
What do you think is this awesome or something else less great? Now if only Borderlands 2 goes free to play.... Hmmmm...
DoTA 2 will be Free to Play. Yup. Awesome. From the horses mouth:
"Today we’re announcing that Dota 2 will be free to play, and contain an in-game store where you’ll be able to buy fancy gear to customize your heroes. From the forum threads we’ve read over the months since The International, it’s pretty clear that this won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone out there. There are a variety of smaller details that we’ve decided to put together a FAQ to help with, but we wanted to address the two most common concerns right away:
Dota 2 will not be a pay-to-win game. All the items in the store are cosmetic, and don’t affect gameplay.
All of the heroes will be available free of charge. We believe restricting player access to heroes could be destructive to game design, so it’s something we plan to avoid."
This really makes sense for this kind of game to be free to play. Having a large user base makes these kinds of games fun. Seems like they made money when Team Fortress 2 went free to play and DoTA 2 sounds like it could do very well too.
What do you think is this awesome or something else less great? Now if only Borderlands 2 goes free to play.... Hmmmm...
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This is probably in response to how well League of Legends has done with almost the same exact model. You pay money for champ skins (cosmetic costumes basically) and can pay money (but don't have to) to unlock champs. The only difference being with Dota2 you will have access to all the champs without any payment.
I don't Riot has released their profits but from other numbers in 2010 they (Business Insider) estimated they net'd about 26m. LoL has only gotten much larger since then...
Its a great model that seems to work well. I didn't know League of Legends was free to play. Somehow that totally escaped me. Will install it for sure.
Game Developer has Riot Games (the LoL guys) listed in the Top 30 Developers list for this year. My favorite quote "Most developers don't get included in a Top 30 list for a game they released almost three years ago. Then again, most developers don't grow their competitive community to the point where a tournament has a $50,000 grand prize or 1.69 million unique viewers, either." Also, apparently LoL had 11.5 million unique active monthly players at the end of 2011. So it will be fun to see what happens with a second player in this space.
Agreed. Just downloaded LoL and it was pretty fun.