Valve wants a New Pay System

Members of Tr!be Gaming
getting ready to defend
the point

Valve's Gabe Newell recently gave an interview where he said that Valve wants to change the way gamers pay for their games. Wait, put down the pitchforks, they want to make it so that if you are a player other people like to play with, or you being on a server causes others to show up you'd pay less to buy other valve games. The flip side of this is talk of griefers and trolls having to pay full price and being charge extra for voice chat, so they don't run off other players.

I've asked some people what they think about this and the main reaction is people are for this, but they're worried about how they would gauge the trolls and griefers. Would this be a community based thing or vote on the servers you're on. Since this is just hypothetical I don't think there's too much to get worried about here, but it does make for some interesting talk about the future of gaming.

Nope, no griefers here.

One other thing that came out was talk of games moving from having a sequel every couple of years to having games updated every couple of months (much like Team Fortress 2 is updated now), supposedly Left for Dead 2 is quickly adapting a similar model, and Portal 2 may join the plan also.

Still want my Guard Dog for TF2.

I will say this if there is one company I trust to turn the industry on its ear, it's Valve. They do so many things right in their games. I maybe biased, but I was never a PC gamer, and I really was out of video games entirely aside from party games with my friends (i.e. Rock Band, Mario Kart, etcetera). It was Team Fortress 2 that really sold me on PC gaming, brought me back into first person shooters. But it's the Steam application that has really made it easier to buy games, and get a community going around these games.

So here's to you Valve thanks for all the hours of fun at such a low price. (Over 300 hours on TF2, grand total spent $10. $20 if you count getting my wifes copy of Team Fortress.)