The number of people playing Team Fortress 2 has increased by a factor of five since it switched to the free-to-play model, according to Gabe Newell, co-founder of developer Valve.
Newell revealed the news at a recent conference in Seattle, Geek Wire reports. Valve is also seeing a far higher percentage of players purchasing virtual items through microtransactions than is typical across the industry.
"Our userbase for our first product that we made free-to-play, Team Fortress 2, increased by a factor of five," Newell said. "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.
"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."
Newell admits, however, that the precise reason for TF2 players being so highly monetised eludes him. "We don't understand what's going on," he said. "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.
"It's an exciting time, but also a very troubling time."
Team Fortress 2 switched to the free-to-play model in June, ten days after Valve opened up its Steam platform to free-to-play games for the first time. While several developers and publishers have reaped dividends from the relatively young model, we reported yesterday on Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard's warning that not everyone should expect to profit from it.
There's an in-depth look at free-to-play in our new issue, E234, which is on shelves today.
Source: Geek Wire