Update: The Half-Life Collection free-to-play bundle is now live. You can play Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 for free until April 1.
Half-Life: Alyx is highly anticipated in the gaming world, and Valve may have just hinted that a Half-Life free-to-play bundle is going to be coming out in the near future.
PC Gamer is reporting on a strange notification that was noticed by a handful of users on Steam. Said notification reportedly stated that the “Half-Life Collection” would be free-to-play until the launch of Half-Life: Alyx, a VR game that is currently expected to arrive sometime in March 2020.
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No one seems to have grabbed a screenshot of the announcement. The page that it reportedly led to now shows “Invalid event specified”, meaning that the event was deleted quickly after it was pushed. It should also be noted that this announcement seems to have been released as part of the Half-Life: Alyx game, meaning that only people who have pre-purchased it or are getting it with their Valve Index headset would have seen it.
Curiously, there is no bundle titled “Half-Life Collection” on Steam. There’s the Half-Life Complete bundle which also includes TF2‘s predecessor Team Fortress Classic and, of course, the Valve Complete Pack which has pretty much everything they’ve ever released for PC. Each of these bundles has games outside of the Half-Life franchise which suggests that a new Half-Life free-to-play bundle will be debuting at some point in the future.
If there is indeed a Half-Life free-to-play bundle coming, there’s one more thing that isn’t quite clear: will it be available to everybody on Steam or only to the people who have pre-purchased Half-Life: Alyx or ordered a Valve Index VR headset? Valve has certainly discounted their bundles heavily before — the Valve Complete Pack has been listed as low as $11.02 according to IsThereAnyDeal — but releasing so many of their premium games for free would be an unprecedented move. Hopefully, we’ll find out more about this in the
