The swap to a free-to-play model has apparently worked out big time for Valve’s Team Fortress 2 – according to the company, the game’s revenue is now twelve times what it was before the switch.<\/p>\n
“This is just the beginning of taking the lessons we’ve learned from TF2 and applying them to Steam itself,” Valve’s Joe Ludwig said at a panel talk at GDC last night. “It was risky, everything could have gone horribly wrong, but we felt it was worth the risk to try the new business model.”<\/p>\n
Valve made the switch in June last year, four years after the game was originally launched. The motivation? Well, most of the people who were ever going to buy it already had.<\/p>\n
“The trouble is, when you’re a AAA box game, the only people who can earn you new revenue are the people who haven’t bought your game,” Ludwig explained.<\/p>\n
“This drives you to build new content to attract new people. There’s a fundamental tension between building the game to satisfy existing players and attract new players.”<\/p>\n
The game now makes money from microtransactions for in-game novelty items, and the conversion rate of people buying stuff is reportedly at a very impressive 20-30 percent.<\/p>\n