Our new Source 2 engine will be free, says Valve
Valve has announced that Source 2, the successor to the Source engine used in its games since Half-Life 2, will be “free to content developers”. The news forms part of the firm’s announcements from GDC 2015.
And that’s pretty much all the information available. So far, Valve hasn’t released any technical details of the new engine, or a feature demo, and the URL listed in its press release currently goes to a ‘Coming Soon’ page.
However, 2015 is turning into the year of the free game engine: first Epic removed the monthly subscription from Unreal Engine, then Unity Technologies removed the feature restrictions from the free version of Unity 5.
Of course, definitions of ‘free’ vary. Unreal Engine is free to use, but you pay Epic 5% royalties if your game is successful; Unity 5 Personal Edition is entirely free, but you can only use it if you make under $100K a year.
It will be interesting to see which model Valve adopts, or whether ‘free’ actually refers to non-commercial work.
According to Valve senior software engineer Jay Stelly, “Source 2 is designed not for just the professional developer, but [for] enabling gamers to participate in the creation and development of their favorite games.”