Valve’s Joe Ludwig noted that in continuing development of Team Fortress 2, adding new content was key to attracting new players. However, he noted that there was a push and pull between getting in new players and keeping the old ones happy.

“Although small updates to the game started immediately after launch, it wasn’t until the medic update in 2008 that significantly changed revenue. Adding so much stuff at once gave the press and community a reason to talk about it, which got more people to try it for the first time,” said Ludwig. “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. There’s a fundamental tension between building the game to satisfy existing players and attract new players.”

Valve then continued updating the game with the ultimate target being a free-to-play title, listening all the time to what players were saying. “We found people in the forums talking about how cool it would be if the Pyro could light the sniper’s arrows on fire,” Ludwig said. “To be honest, we hadn’t considered it, but we were able to implement it by the time the update shipped.”

More than analyzing feedback, Valve used actually assets made by fans. “At this point, more than half of the items in TF2 are contributed by the community,” detailed Ludwig. “Pretty much every place you give the community a chance to change the game, they’ll do it, and they’ll probably do a better job than you would,” Ludwig said, “One more way that the community contributed to updates is by building maps. Up to this point we’ve shipped 19 community maps.”

Charging for items was a key part of the free-to-play transition. “This wasn’t a change we made lightly, but it was something we had to do to get our game into the free-to-play business model. They had never paid for an item in TF2 at any point in the past, and we weren’t sure how willing they’d be to pay now,” said Ludwig. “We dealt with the pay to win concern in a few ways. The first was to make items involve tradeoffs, so there’s no clear winner between two items. But by far the biggest thing we did to change this perception was to make all the items that change the game free. You can get them from item drops, or from the crafting system. It might be a little easier to buy them in the store, but you can get them without paying. The only items we sell exclusive to the store are cosmetic or items optional to gameplay.”

There was also the problem of dealing with virtual currencies and making sure that paying customers didn’t feel ripped off. “Players actually object pretty strongly to the idea that they’ll have to take their money and buy a block of some virtual currency, when they only want to spend a fraction of that on the item they want,” Ludwig said, “TF2 uses the Steam Wallet, which supports all currencies you can normally use on Steam, and lets you load it to the exact amount you want to use. It’s now used by 22 games on Steam.”

“One thing we did was to give paid players a hat called ‘Proof of Purchase’. We also made a distinction between paid and free accounts; smaller backpack sizes, and fewer crates,” he added. “What we didn’t include was any restriction on how you could play the game itself.”

In the end it paid off, and they saw that 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. “This is just the beginning of taking the lessons we’ve learned from TF2 and applying them to Steam itself,” Ludwig said, “It was risky, everything could have gone horribly wrong, but we felt it was worth the risk to try the new business model.”

Source: Gamasutra