Valve Bringing Team Fortress 2 Updates to Xbox 360, Being Forced to Charge Gamers

MS is making valve pay for bandwidth. End of fucking story.

$6/hour for 300 baud? WTF CompuServe?

Whoops, slid back in time 20 years there for a sec, sorry. Carry on :D

I think this is bullshit from Valve personally. If 2K Games wanted to release a few hundred MB of content for free to their customers, would Valve let them release it for free through Steam?

As much as I hate defending MS, they have to charge their clients for bandwidth if it's a huge release. Sure Valve release TF2 content for free through Steam, but Valve owns Steam so for them it's a way to promote both their game and the Steam delivery system. I see TF2 on the Shack front page almost every week because of all the unlockables, which IMO they intentionally roll out slowly just to get exposure. If the DLC was free on Xbox Live, exactly what would MS get out of that?

Going in a different direction, I would be gladly buy TF2 a second time for the value that I have got out of it. 60 hours and going strong, according to the stats. Outside of great games, where else can I get that many hours of entertainment for a fixed price?

I'd rather they don't release it at all. From what I've read, no one plays TF2 on the 360 anyways. So it just seems like they are wasting precious development time.

I approve of Valve making Microsoft look like the overcharging assholes they are on a consistant basis like this.

How about we bring those hard drive prices down to the realm of reality, gentleman?

Cake is a lie. They're full of shit.

A translation of DLC is download-able... download... Downloadable L-word Content?

I was born and raised on goldeneye and starcraft, I don't understand. Patches and updates are just that, but whys "DLC" thrown around so much?

These are the type of things that make me slowly lean back to the PC. Looks like I'm definitely getting Left 4 Dead on PC now.

Smells like a PR move by valve, honestly. There's a ton of free content available on xbox live.

Ah this crap again. I'm still mad that the Marble Blast Ultra expansion never got released because MS was forcing them to charge for it and they wanted to release it for free. I keep regreting getting games for my 360.

I call bullshit. Burnout has several DLC announced for free. CoD4 map-packs, even though they were paid, didn't fracture the community.

The certification process is there to keep there from being four patches in one day.

I think the problem here lies with how Valve is pushing out multiple updates to TF2 that incrementally change the gameplay. Maybe they feel these don't warrant a pay price. Maybe it would be better for Valve to save all of this for one big DLC patch.

The problem here is Valve has a digital distribution method that THEY control and that THEY set the rules on. They want to be able to do that same procedure on Microsoft's platform, and it doesn't work as well. Frankly, I played TF2 on the 360, and it's great. I wish they had these patches, but at the same time I know there are all these stipulations for achievements and certification that Microsoft has in place. Valve got an exemption for the Orange Box as far as achievements go because of the number of games included on that disc. I bet another hang-up is the fact that each of these patches are pushing additional achievements. While that's great on the PC side, this is another hang-up on the Valve can do it their way on Steam but has to do it Microsoft's way on XBOX Live.

I don't think it is as clear-cut as Microsoft doesn't want ANY free DLC.

Even a nominal $5 charge for a complete DLC after they finally finish Team Fortress 2 wouldn't be a huge deal, it might even spur new sales of the game.

What does it mean "forced to charge" ? There are a lot of free updates on X360.

why don't they just wait until they're done with all the content for all the classes before doing this?

I like Valve but isn't this whole 'charging for DLC - no exceptions' thing from MS old news?