Jonathan Lester over at Delspawn.com did an interview with Valve Project Manager Eric Johanson about the progress of the game and what is planned for the future. Valve is planning to have regular tournaments with same amount of prizemoney and could the F2P release of TF2 be a test before release of DotA 2?

Part of the interview with Eric Johanson Project Manager at Valve

Jonathan Lester: Right, sorry, I couldn’t resist. Back on track: the Gamescom DotA tournament you’re running is an absolutely fantastic initiative. Will events like this continue regularly throughout the life of the game?

Erik Johnson: Yeah. So, we want to do an event like this once a year and want to get the best in the world together in one place. And give something pretty entertaining for our fans to watch! There’s also a huge group of DotA tournament organisers who are going to run events of their own throughout the year.

Jonathan Lester: Speaking of Team Fortress 2, how has the recent switch to a free-to-play model treated you?

Erik Johnson: It’s gone great. It’s like everything, we’re always trying to run experiments and learn about what our customers want us to do. TF2 is a great game to try F2P out, to learn about how it would work because the more players, the more fun it is. You want to have a really large community to play with! It’s been really successful, and we learned a lot of lessons about where we want to eventually take DotA.

Full interview: www.dealspwn.com