I have said in other posts that they should have had free trial weekends and I wish they had done this before they devalued the game - discounts at retail. Here is a vid that highlights the announcement:
Thanks DARK! Glad they are doing that to try to beef up the user base. I think we would both agree though that they have to do more to make those new users want to stay and not get bored with it after a month. Otherwise, it's actually counter-productive in the long run. In other words, there are only X number of players who would ever even consider trying TF2. If you lure in a big chunk of them early when you have nothing to keep them, then they may get bored, go away and never come back, and now the amount of players left in that X number is smaller, so even if you do good things later, you have less people to pull in. Once they get a bad taste in their mouth, it takes a lot to convince them to come back.