Computer games developer Valve today announced it will launch five new games for Free to Play (F2P) Games on Steam.
The launch titles - Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online: Free for All, Global Agenda: Free Agent, and Alliance of Valliant Arms (AVA) - will be staggered with bonus downloadable content over the next five days on the
Steam website (starting with Spiral Knights, available from today).
Most of the games fall within the massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) genre, although there is also a first-person shooter (Alliance of Valiant Arms) and a co-op action game (Spiral Knights).
While free to download and play, customers are encouraged to buy virtual goods, extra costumes, experience points and other bonus features from within each game world.
Forsaken Worlds: a fantasy-themed MMORPG.
"The introduction of Free to Play games is another example of the constant evolution of Steam," said Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve. "Free to Play games offer new game genres and game experiences for customers, while offering developers and publishers new revenue opportunities and the ability to reach customers in areas of the world where the traditional packaged goods model is less popular than F2P."
Each launch title will offer exclusive in-game content to those who try the "F2P game of the day" on Steam. In-game transactions in all of the titles will be supported by Steam's micro-transaction backend system currently used in Team Fortress 2.
While we've yet to play the games ourselves, they all currently have a
Metacritic score of 70 or higher, which isn't bad.
