Valve Announces Source 2, It's Going To Be Free To Content Developers

Valve has announced the Source 2 Engine this afternoon from the GDC2015 event taking place in San Francisco.

Source 2 is the successor to the evolving Source Engine that powers many Valve games from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to Team Fortress 2. While Source Engine could be licensed to third-party game studios -- and was -- Valve decided for Source 2 to make it free to all content developers in taking on Unreal Engine 4, which Epic Games has also made free to developers albeit with revenue sharing.

An important feature of Source 2 is that it does support the new Khronos Group specification of Vulkan, the next-generation OpenGL implementation. Source 2 also offers greater Linux support.

With Valve's GDC2015 announcements coming out at the moment, it's not yet known when Source 2 will be available to developers nor when they plan to ship any games powered by the release version of Source 2.