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Team Fortress 2 is now free to play forever -- Download now!
Okay Geek Team
If you haven’t heard by now, Valve has relaunched the famous team-based game Team Fortress 2 as a free-to-play title now running solely off in-game microtransactions. And if you’ve been around the game for any sort of time then you know the type of demand hats and other additional accessories meant to customize your character get. This business model seems to be enough to keep the game running and then some, sparking the idea to make the game now free for the masses.
Speaking with Develop magazine on the subject, Valve was quite keen on moving to this model, hoping to grab the attention of gamers who haven’t tried the game yet, and also players who’ve strayed away from it after initially getting into it:
How did the idea of making Team Fortress 2 free-to-play come around?
“Over the years we’ve done a bunch of price experimentations with the game, going all the way down to $2.49 in our random one-hour Halloween sales.
The more we’ve experimented, the more we’ve learned there are fundamentally different kinds of customers, each with their own way of valuing the product.
Now that we’re shipping it, it feels like a fairly straightforward next step along the “Games as Services” path we’ve been walking down for a while now.”
And when asked about “letting the genie out of the bottle”, so to speak, and allowing a triple AAA title lower its price tag to free, Valve kept it casual and reinforced the idea of community support above anything else and how it could sustain that long-term:
Is there a concern that you’ve let the genie out of the bottle? A triple-A high-quality game for free will change expectations on what you charge for other games, will it not?
“We’re always improving on the relationship we have with our customers, and we’re willing to run experiments if we think it will help us learn how to do that better.
Is the free-to-play move motivated as much by a desire to get people to try the game as it is monetary?
[…] It’s a belief of ours that in multiplayer games it’s generally true that the more people playing the game, the higher value the game has for each individual customer.
The more players, the more available servers in your area, the wider variety of other players you’ll find, the greater the opportunity for new experiences, and so on.
Another way we think of it is that there are a class of players who will never pay us a dime, for a variety of reasons. We’re not upset by that, it’s just a constraint we need to design around. The interesting problem to solve is how to make those freeloaders produce value for our paying customers. Obviously, getting those free players into the game is the first step to doing that.”
Regardless of any of the reasons if you haven’t downloaded the game by now then you’re late to the party, but that’s okay… there’s still some cake in the back.
Download — Steam and Team Fortress 2 (Free)
