Bottiger
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http://gamasutra.com/view/news/164922/GDC_2012_How_Valve_made_Team_Fortress_2_freetoplay.php
Some snippets.
Some snippets.
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.
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 delivered 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.
Valve's audience concern extended into the actual free-to-play transition, as well; it needed to make sure that players who paid for the game didn't feel ripped off. "One thing we did was to give paid players a hat called 'Proof of Purchase'.
Once the item store was introduced, revenues from item sales alone were four times larger than revenues from sales of TF2 itself, and after the free-to-play transition was finished, overall revenue was up 12 times higher than monthly TF2 sales were.