Since moving over to a free-to-play model back in June, it turns out Team Fortress 2’s regular player count has increased by not two, not three, not four, but FIVE.<\/p>\n
It’s not yet been determined how many of those are spies, though.<\/p>\n
“Our user base for our first product that we made free-to-play, Team Fortress 2, increased by a factor of five,” Valve overlord Gabe Newell told attendees at a recent event in Seattle.<\/p>\n
“Then the conversion rate, when we talk to partners who do free-to-play, a lot of people see a two to three per cent conversion rate of the people in their audience who actually buy something.”<\/p>\n
“With Team Fortress 2…we see about a 20 to 30 per cent conversion rate of people who are playing those games who buy something. That’s a fairly surprising and fairly recent statistic, which is that there seems to be something about the content that significantly changes how your monetisation occurs.”<\/p>\n
He admits, however, that they’ve not yet worked out why that conversion rate is so much higher than normal.<\/p>\n
“We don’t understand what’s going on. All we know is we’re going to keep running these experiments to try and understand better what it is that our customers are telling us,” he said.<\/p>\n