Savage 2 is Free, but Why?

Yesterday S2 Games announced that Savage 2: A Tortured Soul for the PC is now freeware. We ask: what gives?

Of course, a little free gaming is nothing to complain about. But when developers and publishers throw out those free titles like bait on the hook, cautious games sensing something fishy have to question the motives behind such offers. Are the games crap? Will they lock up our PCs to the point that they become weapons of mass destruction and set the house ablaze?   Is this some ploy to track software pirates?

So when S2 Games announced yesterday that Savage 2: Tortured Soul is now considered freeware, curious minds just had to know, thus we fired an email over to S2 Games for clarification. "Savage 2 is nearing the end of it’s one year support," said S2 Games’ Shawn Tooley. "We felt that giving away the game for free and selling Prime accounts that would allow access to stats, game replays, clans, extra inventory slots, etc would be a great way to continue to monetize the product. "

And while the official website sports the words "100% FREE" in bold red letters, gamers will quickly discover that a Prime account will cost a one-time fee of $9.99 for those looking for the fore-mentioned additional inventory slots, access to player statistics, the ability to download captured replays of all matches and more (wait, didn’t he just say that?) . Gamers must create an account (either Free or Prime) in order to download the client, and will need a 2.2GHz Pentium 4, 1GB of RAM and a DirectX 9. 0 compliant graphics card at the very minimum.

Released early this year, Savage 2: A Tortured Soul combines real-time strategy with the action of a first-person shooter, and character-building elements of a role-playing game. Building upon the first installment’s Real Time Strategy Shooter gameplay elements, Savage 2 adds squad-based features and character-leveling abilities. Gamerankings.com gives Savage 2 an average ratio score of 77 percent, whereas Metacritic.com gives the game an overall score of 75 out of 100.

S2 Games also announced that a Mac OS X client is also available for all Apple games, now accompany the Linux, Linux 64 bit and PC versions. The download for the Windows client weighs in around 979MB.