They just announced that ArmA 2 will have a free version, no money and micro transactions at all. Free, you just won't have the SP campaign and user mods.

Soon, you'll get it from: http://www.arma2.com/free

Bohemia Int. is on roll... serious. They have 3 games in development (ArmA 3, Take on Helicopters, Carrier Command) and now this free game. Kudos to them.

no SP, no mods and no "HD Graphics", which likely means anything beyond medium is out of the question, which is a bit annoying. :/ But I'll use it to find out if I wanna drop money on the game.

It's like TrackMania Nations Forever. It's a cut down version, but cut in ways that should be fairly unimportant for the overall experience.

TMNF certainly made me buy TMUF. I'm psyched for TrackMania 2 too.

That nice. I never tryed it, so i have now chance to do it :) Thx for info.

Most people don't have a PC powerful enough to run it on high and be playable, so I'm not surprised on that.

And I think it's even better to have it all on Medium or alike, because most people that play F2P games don't have that much money to spend on games, and even less to spend on the latest GPU available. It would be bad marketing to default it to high settings and newbies getting it to play at painful 10 FPS (just to uninstall it 2 minutes later). Don't you agree? Exactly.

The mission editor is still present. Have fun, and share it to friends.

The next year you might have a clan then, to buy and play ArmA 3 with them. ;)

Yeah I think this is the good idea behind it, being such a niche game it's difficult to attract much new audience. I really like the ArmA games despite their clear quality control shortcomings. It's good to see BIS is building momentum with this.

Hope this doesn't go down the way Company of Heroes Online did.

Ooohh...interested now. :)

Unlikely. Company of Heroes Online operated like an MMO: persistent stats, soldiers etc, thus everything required the back end servers. This is probably closer to TrackMania Nations Forever: aside for the account registration system, which would probably be the same system as the pay-for version, everything else is on dedicated servers operated by someone else, thus Bohemain Interactive doesn't have to shell out wonga to keep it running (unlike Relic and CoHO).