

Lets be real, "free to play" doesn't mean that they aren't going to make money off it and a lot of the most successful money driven games are free to play titles. Perhaps the "leaning away from" and investigation means that they are going to have a free version available with limitations that you pay an upgrade fee to convert to full version, everyone here is just speculating including the devs as they are still working on the game and need time to think about the way they will monetise it. They just have to do what makes sense to them.

If you are wanting to play it with some friends and they are unwilling to buy it then you might not even buy it yourself which is a loss of 3 potential players immediately. With a three person squad it's much easier to get your friends into the game by just saying 'hey download this new free title and play with me' and suddenly the game has +3 players. Some of the games are very high quality and fun to play but without a playerbase to sustain them nobody is going to buy them and with nobody buying them there is no incentive for the dev to work on it. Just need someone on their team to push for it and it could still happen. Once they go through the Steam store more they might reconsider it, lots of dead in the water indie multiplayer only games on there that decided to slap a pricetag on and would later come to regret it. The Transistor theme is great too but I think it's 3. As is the free Playstation Heroes theme (also limited to US accounts), but I'm not sure if this is still available or if it was only available for a limited time.

Yes that is correct "leaning away from" means probably not going to be fully F2P but they haven't outright given up on the idea of F2P or they would just say it will be a fully paid game, they are still in the process of investigating what makes sense and how other games have fared. PSNow theme for free on US accounts is pretty nice.
