Dota 2 - Free to play - With a twist

Keep in mind that Dota 2 will be a free-to-play game that offers micro-transactions similar to free PC video games as announced by Gabe Newell in an interview.

"It's going to be free-to-play -- it'll have some twists, but that's the easiest way for people to think about it,"

 

Most importantly the micro-transactions will be similar to Team Fortress 2. Dota 2 will feature hats, hero skins, courier skins and announcer packs. This is probably not appealing to many players because it will be similar to Team Fortress 2 where people just collect items instead of playing the actual game. We will see how Valve transitions Dota 2 with the micro-transactions in the future. 

"It's going to be free-to-play -- it'll have some twists, but that's the easiest way for people to think about it,"

"The issue that we're struggling with quite a bit is something I've kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people's contributions to a community?

"It's just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people."

"We're trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else [are] recognized and accommodated. We all know people where if they're playing we want to play, and there are other people where if they're playing we would [rather] be on the other side of the planet.

"It's just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people."

"When you start thinking about the different games that people play and you try to think about how people can create value or a service in one game and benefit somebody in a different game, you can start to see how the different games sort knit together," 

"In a sense, think of individual games as instance dungeons of a larger experience, if that makes sense as a concept." 

Thanks to sevendaycooldown for the podcast:Source