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Comment by corin_ | Hacker News Reader

I didn't care when gamers on sites I read took this at face-value and nodded along, but on HN I'm shocked nobody has yet pointed out that he's talking PR spin.

They've started a big push marketing the game, they obviously want people to stay excited for what it is, rather than thinking about any downsides. His answer doesn't mean they haven't thought about it, it means one of two things: either they are yet to come to a decision, or it won't actually be free-to-play. Either way, answering that in this interview would have been a moronic step to take, so he changed the subject away from it, and onto "we care more about games than money".

I love Valve, they're a wonderful company, but they definitely think about monetisation right from the start of a project - they're not idiots. And making money from a game doesn't have to mean the game isn't good.

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> "we care more about games than money".

He said they care about the games first, i.e. ordering over time. I quote, adding emphasis to his time-based terms (four times):

> "and then we'll worry about monetization ... we're not going to worry about that until later." Further pressing the point, Newell adds, "Premature monetization is the root of all evil."

> "I think not sucking is way more of an important thing to pay attention to first,"

As an example of making something cool first, and monetizing later, consider google. They didn't do ads for several years, until they found a way to do it that didn't conflict with what made their search cool.

BTW: kevingadd's perceptive, reasoned and evidence-based reply to you is [dead] - this is disturbing to see on HN.

I'll reply here with some extra text on top in hopes that whatever caused it to get flagged as dead doesn't flag it again. Thanks for pointing out it was dead...

I don't think that's actually true. If you look at a lot of their past projects, the real clever monetization comes after release, and very often they release piles of cool content entirely for free when they could easily have charged for it. They also spend much longer in development than is strictly necessary, and that tends to not make sense if your goal is to earn money efficiently. As a company they clearly understand monetization, but I don't think it drives their development process.

I read it differently. I think Valve wants to hold off on the free-to-play announcement so that it has the biggest impact. Making TF2 (their game that they call their testing ground for new ideas) free to play with an item store seemed to me to be a fairly obvious telegraph of their Dota 2 plans.

Even if that's the case, my point still stands: it's not that they prioritise making a good game over thinking about monetization, and anyone who thinks they do is way too gullible.

Counterpoint: The Orange Box. It's quite possible that it's made them more money in the long run since it introduced many people to Portal and TF2 than may have played otherwise. However it's hard to imagine that there was a strong profit-maximization argument back in 2007 for bundling five top tier games (three of which at launch) for $50.

I just don't see it.

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