In an interesting and potentially brilliant move, Valve has made the highly popular Team Fortress 2 a free-to-play game. Gamers can play for free, but can also spend money — through Steam, naturally — on premium items.
The gambit is part of a huge shift in gaming; a lot of franchises are trying to evolve from boxed goods to games-plus-services. While Valve’s strategy is quite different from what Activision plans to do with Call of Duty and what Electronic Arts has planned for Battlefield, Team Fortress 2 shifting to a freemium model is another sign that the times are changing.
What do you guys and dolls think of Team Fortress 2 becoming a free-to-play game? Are you more or less interested in the game now that it’s freemium?
I thought this sounded like an interesting idea when I heard Newell talk about this before. What I can't get out of my head is how this sounds exactly like the Apogee model which eventually failed in the early to mid-90's, only now Valve is doing it and we've forgotten that this model didn't work the first time around. With that being said I will definitely be downloading TF2 through Steam since it's free. Now I just have to hope my laptop can handle it, or wait to really play it once I get a computer that can handle it better.
Pulled it down. I feel so behind the curve in it though.
It sounds like the model alot of mobile developers have been using to me.
As I've stated on numerous accounts, I play the hell out of a game called Cartel Wars. This game is free to download and play. With the in-app purchases though, I've given these developers easily $250 since November of '09. Now… the server has about 500,000 accounts and I know people in the game who you can see by a ribbon on their profile that they've spent at least $1000 but by talking to them, it becomes obvious that they spent alot more than that, it's just the highest level ribbon other players can see.
I would hazard that the game makes enough through this to stay afloat and I've seen lots of other games follow the same model on the mobile platform. Hell… Farmville does it.
Steam using this model is an absolutely brilliant strategy in my opinion.