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That's how Blizzard's doing Starcraft 2 in China.

Wouldn't you say TF2 was that kind of game?

Even thought it is free now, it's been sold the traditional way for a long time so I don't think it quite counts as a freemium game. Valve's already reaped most of the sales profits it's going to get from TF2.

Except for the TF2 in-game store. Valve does a pretty brisk business in hats, weapons and gadgets, so much business that they're able to offer new content regularly for a four-year old game.

TF2 is not anywhere as competitive as StarCraft 2. There's no ladder, no ranking, no matchmaking..

Not true. League of Legends is competitive, popular, and free to play. The developer, Riot Games, recently sold for $400 million. They just hosted their first major tournament which had over 200,000 concurrent users streaming the final match.