Black Mesa brings a new life to HL2 by improving. But yes, the gist of it is that we’re just going to go ahead and make the Source SDK freely available. Black Mesa is a free-to-play 3rd party Source Engine modification of Valve’s renowned video-game Half-Life and it is now officially released. DOTA 2 Toolset or Destinations Toolset (you'll need to fake VR for destinations) both are available under Steam tools. It’s a bit messy because we have multiple versions of the SDK, and there’s some dependencies we need to shake out. There are more specialized toolkits you can use for DotA2 and Destinations, which are both using Source 2. We are in the process of getting it all done. When RockPaperShotgun emailed Walker for further confirmation, and he went on to explain: Thanks for making us better!' Says Robin Walker. That said, your email has triggered a process here that made us re-examine that, and we’re going to just go ahead and make the Source SDK freely available.

This means that all Source mods, made for Valve games (we list around 1,500 for HL2 alone) may eventually be free to play, without requiring you to purchase a Valve game (thou who hasn't purchased a valve game on this site?) 'Yep.

The free SDK was first uncovered in Moddb's forums on the 28th of June by an enterprising young man going by the name of Riley, who just happens to be the playtest leader of esteemed Source mods Zombie Panic: Source and No More Room In Hell. This news comes a little late, but for those unaware due to the recent release of a free Team Fortress 2, the Source SDK will soon become free to use in its entirety, for everyone (confirmed by Valve's Robin Walker in this RockPaperShotgun article). Following the free to play release of TF2, Source SDK has been accidentally released free, and will remain that way.

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