Like Team Fortress 2, Valve make DotA 2 free to play - revenue via in-game store | Hacker News Reader

Like Team Fortress 2, Valve make DotA 2 free to play - revenue via in-game store

blog.dota2.com

62 pointsSmerity26 comments

I am becoming a big fan of the free to play model. I think it serves a lot of players well:

* When you're a kid, money is a scarcity. I would have loved to have had a bunch of quality F2P games when I was a kid. (Of course, these games tend to be online-based and the commercial Internet wasn't around back then, kids today don't know how good they have it, off my lawn, etc etc)

* When you're a working adult, it's free time that's the scarcity. I'm happy to throw some coin at Tribes: Ascend to give me some of the equipment that I wouldn't have the time to grind and unlock.

* If you're my wife, it's interest level that's the scarcity. She finds game here and there that really grab her interest, but everything else just gets a "meh". F2P means the ability to sample, no sunken cost besides a little bandwidth usage. It's better than demos were, because if the game is a winner, there's no transition hassle from demo to full product - you just keep on playing.

I am becoming a big fan of the free to play model. I think it serves a lot of players well

Probably, but not me. I'm the grumpy old curmudgeon that prefers to pay a one-time fee for a quality game and compete purely on skill, not on hours spent grinding or real money spent flipping bits in a DB somewhere. And even at $50 a pop even the typical teenager should be able to pay cash down for a game every month or two.

What this is really about is shutting down piracy.

There is absolutely nothing in the dota2 store which affects gameplay. All items are 100% cosmetic. This allows anyone to go in and play any hero on even ground, but if you like a character you can spend a little irl coin to customize and stand out.

Yeah I was referring to the comment about buying gear in Tribes. I don't have a problem with cosmetic in-game purchases except maybe a worry that they give game designers the wrong incentives.

"And even at $50 a pop even the typical teenager should be able to pay cash down for a game every month or two."

Maybe in the USA and Europe. But in much of the rest of the world -"$50 dollar" usually cost close to $100 dollars -the typical teenager does not have $50 dollars of disposable income every two months.

F2P is really awesome.

They pretty much had to make it f2p to have a chance against LoL, the currently dominant game in the genre.

Dota 2 vs LoL should be pretty interesting. I'd argue that LoL has an extremely strong first mover advantage. Dota was technically first, but it wasn't a standalone game, and was completely inaccessible for new players, so I don't really count it.

What i'm curious to see is if a company with as much reputation/money as valve can overcome that. If I was a gambling man i'd guess that LoL is going to stay #1, both because they have the first mover advantage, and because this is Riot's only product, so they have way more at stake than Valve, and are going to work harder to make sure they have the best product.

I think it's less about Dota vs LoL, and more about Dota 2 vs HoN.

While LoL appeals to a large amount of players who don't enjoy how hard the original DotA was, the competitive scene isn't there (for many reasons, but amongst them it's just doesn't require the same level of skill as HoN or DotA). Dota 2 needs to capture this competitive scene for it to be taken seriously.

Dota 2 is also competing with the original DotA which still has a large following of people that haven't moved onto LoL because it's a different type of game, and haven't moved onto HoN because it isn't DotA.

I'm very confident that Dota 2 will nail the competitive aspect, and that the loyal DotA fans will finally make the move, as will many HoN players.

As I mentioned before, LoL is a very different game, catered for a more casual audience and I honestly wouldn't be surprised to find them co-existing.

I'm also very glad that Valve have decided to skip the bullshit micro transactions for heroes that both Riot and S2 have implemented.

I expect that LoL might retain a devoted playerbase, sort of like Runescape, but I definitely predict that Dota 2 will be making a ton of money and getting all the attention.

- They seem serious about sponsoring tournaments and making it competitive and balanced

- LoL turns off a lot of people with pay to win

- Their interface and client is already holy shit way better, like night-and-day better, and I expect that it will just get more better, since they have more talent and more man-hours

- They should know how to promote and run F2P games as well as Riot, since TF2 was a big success for them

When I worked on LoL, there was a lot of focus that it not be play to win (this right up to release). I wondered how that would turn out. What would you say is wrong?

(I'm not a big fan of the genre [I'm not a pvp guy], so I haven't kept up on the game.)

As a semi-casual player -- maybe I played 200 games ever -- I could not possibly play enough to earn many of the champions, so I get to choose between not having them or paying a ton of money (IIRC, many are like five to ten bucks a pop.) In addition, the newest champions are typically both the most powerful (at least for a while, until they are nerfed) and the most expensive, so those who pay get them first.

Stronger players could also buy XP boosts, to level their summoner faster than I could, and IP boosts, to buy better runes than I could -- those are just strict improvements to their characters' stats with no caveats. The only way a non-payer could achieve parity on these metrics would be to play many hundreds or thousands of games.

Upon reaching competitive level (level 30), you must have won a descent enough amount of free points (IP, as opposed to RP that one gets only by paying) to have a bunch of champions with appropriate runes. I think it is not really a problem, because you need to master the champions you play anyway to have some fun and win games. Then, if one really enjoys the game, one plays just for the fun and IPs can stack up without you noticing.

The IP boosts thing is actually not a good idea: you reach higher levels artificially, without gaining real experience with the game and the champions you play. If you go straight to ranked games at level 30 by this mean, your ELO will probably be very poor; you'll be flamed by your team for your poor play, and that's a really bad experience (you'll have to learn to ignore clueless flamers though).

It should also be noted that Riot is not very greedy: sometimes you get free IP boosts, and even free RP (not enough to immediately buy something though - well played). And upon a recent server incident they refunded me RPs without asking questions - even though they could see I never bought anything from them.

The only things one cannot get just by playing are skins (custom outfits for the characters). As strange as it seems to me, it is actually the first thing that some players buy - instead of things that would improve their character's stats.

It seems to me that it works in a similar way as shareware games works. I also think it is an interesting response to the problem of piracy. See for instance Blizzard with Starcraft 2, who apparently refuse to offer LAN mode just because of that.

The playability has improved greatly since the original DotA. The UI for DotA 2 has been tweaked to be far more friendly to the novice player. Items used to be one of the most confusing elements of the game and has been fixed by giving each player a simple to follow suggested items guide.

Starting a game is also incredibly streamlined. Three or four clicks, a "time until in game" suggestion and then that's it. They've also introduced a karma system where you reward or punish other players for their actions, including language, suicidal playing style and so on.

I agree it'll be interesting to see how it competes with other games in the same genre but my money right now would be on DotA 2 simply as Valve really know how to make their games.

DotA was not at all novice friendly and I do believe DotA 2 has done a lot to reduce the barrier of entry.

The UI is simply amazing at this point and all matchmaking based games should really look at DotA 2 before designing their UI, it is simply that good (in my opnion).

Sure LoL is dominant game in North America and even EU and most importantly while LoL numbers can be tracked while original DOTA numbers aren't trackable. But if what I hear is true, then DOTA is huge in China and that player base is more likely to switch to Dota2 than LoL. With F2P model and upcoming LAN support, dota2 has pretty good chance in China and that itself can dwarf north american player base.

Does Valve care if it can't make it to #1? More sophisticated arguments aside, having the largest userbase is not necessarily a win when following the f2p model. What you really want is the largest paying userbase, a distinct metric that is easy to forget.

It seems to have worked well in TF2 and MOBA players appears to be quite accepting of paying for cosmetic stuff.

I hope for Valve's sake they will be able to pull it off as I really enjoy Dota 2.

There are few concerns about how ability to customize a hero can affect fantasy aspect of the game. It will be weird if a hero called Anti-Mage suddenly walks around with cowboy hat. There is also a concern of heros suddenly not being recognizable at all, but I think valve will provide various options to get around that.

All in all pretty good move though. It will help propel Dota2 to biggest game in China etc where Warcraft3 engine based DOTA is already very popular.

Ten Cent made an investment in Riot Games with the plan to take League of Legends into China. How is it doing against DotA?

I really think Valve knows how to do this right. If you get people hooked on the gameplay they'll pay for silly extravagances. See: Basketball and LA Lights.

For the community generated content, Valve pays the creator twenty-five percent (25%) of the Adjusted Gross Revenue[1]. TF2 has already paid out $3.5 million to creators, so it's reasonable to assume the TF2 economy has rewarded Valve to the tune of ~$10 million.

I think this could work out very well for them.

[1]: http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/workshoplegalagreement

That number doesn't include items which they don't pay the item creator. Most notable as far as I know keys don't pay anything towards content creators, and they're a very important piece of the economy.

> If you get people hooked on the gameplay they'll pay for silly extravagances.

Some part of me is picturing them becoming the most successful virtual haberdasher ever.

http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Hats

Is it possible to play a dota-like game in single-player? I don't enjoy playing multiplayer games and registering to play.

Dota2 has a co-operative play against AI players, and I assume you can play this mode on your own if you wish; however this entire genre typically focuses on multiplayer values to get the most out of the game. For example, there is no storyline, and the gameplay depends entirely on working together with your team-mates to overcome a huge range of situations that develop from different hero line-ups.

I've played only the original DoTA, and it's possible there. You can either play solo against a single AI, or have n AI heroes in the opponent team and (n-1) AIs in your team - I'd recommend the latter with n=5. The AIs play like an intermediate level player (albeit with a few exploitable weaknesses).

in my previous company, a large national financial institution, we (IT dept) had "dota hour" almost every day during lunch time. the interesting part is the teams were divided by "managers/supervisors vs staffs".

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