Team Fortress 2 stats highlight success of free-to-play model

During Steam Dev Days, Valve discussed the value of in-game economies to boost revenue and user experience.

Team Fortress 2 is their main example, being one of the first titles on Steam to make use of the now ubiquitous in-game item market economy.

The Team fortress Mann-conomy, which introduced the in-game item store (and Hat Fortress 2 meme), was launched in October 2010 alongside the Steam Wallet.

In June 2011 the game went entirely free-to-play, with the item economy becoming Valve’s revenue stream for the title.

Some Team Fortress 2 stats that emerged from the presentation:

17 million accounts own items.
500 million total items.
4 billion actions performed on items.
Monthly active players now at 3 million.
1,067,399 accounts have sent gifts.
1,841,051 accounts have received gifts.
The leading gift-giver has sent out 12,355 gifts.
13% of TF2 players have bought at least one key, and 75% of players have at least one thing from a crate.
90% of TF2 content comes from the community.
In the first week of 2014, US$400,000 was paid to content creators.

Valve discussed the psychology behind this type of free-to-play game revenue stream, as it applies to many of the free-to-play titles on Steam, and not just their in-house games.

Valve tries to avoid creating unhappy customers with poor micro-transaction system. This trains customers to not spend money, which is obviously a bad thing for the developer. Valve rejects the idea that micro-transactions come at the cost of user happiness

The company believes it is not necessarily a bad thing to have pay-to-win systems, but it is a problem when this makes other users unhappy. Happy players means everyone makes more money.

Valve wants users to create value for each other and recommends that all game items be tradeable. The company says that this is a good way to monetise free players; they don’t pay, but they still generate value.

Source: SteamDB