"June 23, 2011—Valve, creators of bestselling game franchises (such as Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), announced today that after four years and over 200 updates, its popular and critically-acclaimed online action game Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is now Free To Play (F2P). The F2P announcement comes as part of the "Über Update". Released today, it is the largest content pack delivered to TF2 since it shipped in 2007. New players interested in experiencing what PC Gamer calls "the most fun you can have online" will have access to training and offline practice modes, so they can hone their skills before jumping into the ever-expanding TF2 universe. To celebrate the launch of the Über Update, Valve has released "Meet the Medic," the latest in its series of TF2 animated shorts. TF2 is now Free to Play for PC & Mac players via Steam. For more information on Free to Play, please visit
http://www.teamfortress.com/freetoplay. For more information on the "Über Update" and "Meet the Medic", please visit
http://www.teamfortress.com/uberupdate.
There will be two types of accounts on Team Fortress 2. The Free ones: those who downloaded the game since its free and did not buy something more; and Premiums: those who paid prior to the update, or purchased any items in the shop.
Limits of the F2P version:
- The inventory has only 50 slots
- Inability to have rare items (only standard ones)
- No access to all the blueprints
- No exchange possible, only the option to receive items
- No gifting, only the option to receive."
In brief, the game is now a F2P, but F2P accounts will have limitations. Still don't know if I should get it or not, since the limitations seem a bit too "restrictive".