Sneakyone wrote...
I even have some of these lying around, are they just giving the game out at this point?
Well, it
IS meant to be free. You can't call it as a closed-off beta at this point, because what Valve is doing right now is to send out as many invites as they can.
Why? They still can't handle millions of players suddenly surging into DOTA2 because they have limited servers.
So they're sending out invites to everyone, so that you could invite others, so that the playerbase will grow steadily as Valve slowly adds more servers.