In June of 2011, Valve Software took its four-year-old online first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 and made it completely free-to-play -- and ended up
increasing revenues by
RuneScape Gold a factor of twelve as a result. Valve's Joe Ludwig ran a
GDC session Wednesday that explained exactly how four years' worth of content
updates, tweaks, and community engagement helped Valve transition TF2 from a
triple-A boxed title to a free-to-play game built around
microtransactions.Updates
players hookedBuilding large updates with additional content was key to maintaining player interest and expanding the player base. "Although small
updates to the game started immediately after launch, it wasn't until the medic
update in 2008 that significantly changed revenue," Ludwig said. "Adding so much
stuff at once gave the press and
Buy RS Gold community a reason to talk about it, which got
more people to try it for the first time."However, Valve soon found that the
business
for a triple-A boxed game didn't quite mesh with their development strategy. "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. This drives you to
build new content to attract new people," Ludwig said, "There's a fundamental
tension between building the game to satisfy existing players and attract new
players." In order to resolve this tension, Valve continued to release updates
that
new maps, game modes, weapons, and even entire new game systems (in-game items, a marketplace, and a trading system, for example) with the eventual goal
of switching over to free-to-play.Community engagement key for maintaining
player interestIn order to make a successful free-to-play game, Valve needed to
make sure that its players were constantly coming back to Team Fortress 2 and
checking back in. Part of its strategy entailed engaging its player community in
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