Speaking in an interview with Develop, Valve head Gabe Newell expressed his company's idea for rewarding players popular with their peers. Newell said that the studio was "looking into what [it] can do with payment services than engine services."
"The industry has this broken model, which is one price for everyone," he said. "THat's actually a bug, and it's something that we want to solve through our philosophy of how we create our entertainment products."
"What you really want to do is create the optimal pricing service for each customer and see what's best for them. We need to give customers, all of them, a robust set of options regarding how they pay for their content."
Newell went on to suggest that the company could reward popular players who are good for a game's community by giving them access to lower priced products.
"Some people, when they join a server, a ton of people will run with them. Other people, when they join a server, will cause others to leave. We have a way of capturing that," he said. "We should have a way of rewarding the people who are good for our community."
"So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get DOTA 2 for free, because of past behavior in Team Fortress 2."
As a counterpoint, Newell also suggested the possibility of penalizing players who proved themselves detrimental to the gaming community.
Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice."
It remains to be seen whether Valve will implement any of its ideas in the near future, although the possibility that they will experimental with DOTA2 is pretty damn high, given game's potential reliance on communal and social mechanics.
