Team Fortress 2 by the People, for the People
Last month Valve issued a sizeable update to its popular team-based online shooter Team Fortress 2 called the Mann-Conomy. The odd title shouldn't divert your attention from the impressive results and interesting potential long-term consequences. Basically, the update added a microtransaction store to the game. It offered a variety of headgear, weapons, and other random items like paint buckets to players for a price. You didn't have to buy anything, but could spend $17.49 on a crocodile hat if you wanted to.
Maybe you already knew that. What you probably didn't know is how much the community is not only contributing, but profiting. Not only is Valve putting its own items up for sale on the in-game store, but it's allowing players to submit designs for approval. If they're good enough, Valve assigns appropriate statistics and a price and pushes it live, letting anyone who likes the look to make the purchase. Valve's not keeping all the profits; it's cutting out 25 percent and giving it directly to the creators.
So, should you be fortunate enough to get an item on the store, not only do you get to play around with items you created, but you get to directly profit from your passion for Valve's products. How much can be made? Well Valve just flew players out to its studio in Bellevue, Wash. and handed over checks. Steven Skidmore and Spencer Kern, amongst others, were given royalty checks for sums ranging from $39,000 to $47,000, and that's just for two weeks.
Silly hats for fun and profit.
"I was pretty flabbergasted," said Skidmore. "You don't really assume it would catch on that well. When it did go through and you see the success of it, it shows that this is really the future of gaming, putting the games in the hands of the community."
"When we got here we both estimated what we were going to get," said Kern, "and we were just blown away by how much we actually received. It's astounding to know that that many people took an interest in all these custom items coming out of the community. It's great to see that people actually want to have the community items and that they're not just an afterthought."
Of course the idea of a community driving a game's development and evolution isn't really something new. From modding to monitoring user feedback to contribute to ongoing updates, the player base has always played a part in how a game develops. It's just that in this case, you can make quite a bit of money doing it. The initial few might be the luckiest, though. Presumably, should the process of creating user items become popular enough, it might be difficult to get your item visibility, similar to the issues developers face while vying for attention on the cluttered App Store, though Valve is confident community feedback will bubble up the what's best
So what's the process like? The official instructions are up on Valve's site, and Robin Walker, lead designer on Team Fortress 2, offered up some additional details about how the approval process works.
"Right now the process is we look through all the submissions that come in, the artists and the TF team look at those submissions and decide the ones that make the most sense, fit the style the best, and so on and we put them in the game," Walker said. "Our goal would be to try and push out some new ones every couple of weeks. Right now we're sort of not in a place where we can do that as fast as we'd like, so one of the things we're investing in heavily now in response to the Mann-Conomy update's success are much better tools to allow these guys to get their stuff into the game. Allow them to do things like ship their own updates and do iterations on their versions, get stats on where their items are being bought the most and who likes them, and be able to build a channel direct to their customers so they can find out why they like some of the choices and why they don't like them so they can get a better sense of what they should do next time around."
Even though Valve is currently assigning statistical benefits to the items, the idea is for the community to take over aspects of that as well. Walker said there are a lot of great ideas out there and Valve is working to try and facilitate cooperation. That being said, There are many potential pitfalls to the process, something Valve's managing director Gabe Newell elaborated on.
"If you sell levels, there's a negative externality of that which is you fracture your community around ownership of the level," Newell said. "How can you reward people for creating a level without fracturing the community? One example of an idea, not necessarily one we'll implement, would be that people could buy a badge or some other piece of affinity appearance-altering merchandise that say 'I really like this level,' and that's the way the level designer gets compensated. And someone who has that affinity object gets advantages or distinctions when playing on that level. Coming up with solutions like that is coming up with the designer of these kinds of frameworks. How do you build a system where the community can maximize its contributions to the shared experience."
Considering how confident Valve is that this type of player-driven microtransaction market is the way to go, how the company will prevent Team Fortress 2 from veering into total anarchy is a point of interest. According to Robin Walker, that's something that again will be monitored by the community.
Clearly the Heavy is excited. Also, on fire.
"Some of the things we've shipped in the past have in a couple cases been deliberate data-gathering on our part to find out are we crazy here," Walker said. "The community itself has a good understanding of what's good and what's bad and to some extent the system here is the ultimate in connecting the community feedback system to the content being released."
Gabe Newell added, "Even down to the level of individual items there's now there's way more opportunity to the community to signal 'this is cool' and 'this is lame.' I know the five people that were involved in this first release are incredibly interested now in how they can build on this success. They're going to be very responsive to what they see, in terms of people purchasing stuff and people talking about it, they're going to look at that in a very fine-grained way and get information back pretty quickly, 'Oh I correctly interpreted what people are saying' or 'Oh, actually they don't want more alligator stuff.'"
One question dangling off the end of this issue is: now that Valve considers the system a success, how widespread will it be throughout other Valve products?
"We tend not to, somewhat annoyingly to some of our customers, not do the thing we did before over and over again in exactly the same say," Newell said. "It's hard to predict how we'll use this new information. As I'm reminded of on an almost daily basis, we seemed to be really excited about that episodic thing with [Half-Life 2] Episode One and Episode Two, and then we've gone completely radio silent subsequently. Sometimes it's even dangerous for us to predict what we'll do next.
"We certainly recognize that this is very interesting, that we need to think about the implications of this for anything we do." According to Newell, that could include single-player or multiplayer experiences.
And since the Half-Life Episodes were brought up, we had to ask: any update on Episode 3? "Gabe opened the door and I'll shut it," Valve VP of Marketing Doug Lombardi said after a round of laughter.
Maybe you already knew that. What you probably didn't know is how much the community is not only contributing, but profiting. Not only is Valve putting its own items up for sale on the in-game store, but it's allowing players to submit designs for approval. If they're good enough, Valve assigns appropriate statistics and a price and pushes it live, letting anyone who likes the look to make the purchase. Valve's not keeping all the profits; it's cutting out 25 percent and giving it directly to the creators.
So, should you be fortunate enough to get an item on the store, not only do you get to play around with items you created, but you get to directly profit from your passion for Valve's products. How much can be made? Well Valve just flew players out to its studio in Bellevue, Wash. and handed over checks. Steven Skidmore and Spencer Kern, amongst others, were given royalty checks for sums ranging from $39,000 to $47,000, and that's just for two weeks.
Silly hats for fun and profit.
"I was pretty flabbergasted," said Skidmore. "You don't really assume it would catch on that well. When it did go through and you see the success of it, it shows that this is really the future of gaming, putting the games in the hands of the community."
"When we got here we both estimated what we were going to get," said Kern, "and we were just blown away by how much we actually received. It's astounding to know that that many people took an interest in all these custom items coming out of the community. It's great to see that people actually want to have the community items and that they're not just an afterthought."
Of course the idea of a community driving a game's development and evolution isn't really something new. From modding to monitoring user feedback to contribute to ongoing updates, the player base has always played a part in how a game develops. It's just that in this case, you can make quite a bit of money doing it. The initial few might be the luckiest, though. Presumably, should the process of creating user items become popular enough, it might be difficult to get your item visibility, similar to the issues developers face while vying for attention on the cluttered App Store, though Valve is confident community feedback will bubble up the what's best
So what's the process like? The official instructions are up on Valve's site, and Robin Walker, lead designer on Team Fortress 2, offered up some additional details about how the approval process works.
"Right now the process is we look through all the submissions that come in, the artists and the TF team look at those submissions and decide the ones that make the most sense, fit the style the best, and so on and we put them in the game," Walker said. "Our goal would be to try and push out some new ones every couple of weeks. Right now we're sort of not in a place where we can do that as fast as we'd like, so one of the things we're investing in heavily now in response to the Mann-Conomy update's success are much better tools to allow these guys to get their stuff into the game. Allow them to do things like ship their own updates and do iterations on their versions, get stats on where their items are being bought the most and who likes them, and be able to build a channel direct to their customers so they can find out why they like some of the choices and why they don't like them so they can get a better sense of what they should do next time around."
Even though Valve is currently assigning statistical benefits to the items, the idea is for the community to take over aspects of that as well. Walker said there are a lot of great ideas out there and Valve is working to try and facilitate cooperation. That being said, There are many potential pitfalls to the process, something Valve's managing director Gabe Newell elaborated on.
"If you sell levels, there's a negative externality of that which is you fracture your community around ownership of the level," Newell said. "How can you reward people for creating a level without fracturing the community? One example of an idea, not necessarily one we'll implement, would be that people could buy a badge or some other piece of affinity appearance-altering merchandise that say 'I really like this level,' and that's the way the level designer gets compensated. And someone who has that affinity object gets advantages or distinctions when playing on that level. Coming up with solutions like that is coming up with the designer of these kinds of frameworks. How do you build a system where the community can maximize its contributions to the shared experience."
Considering how confident Valve is that this type of player-driven microtransaction market is the way to go, how the company will prevent Team Fortress 2 from veering into total anarchy is a point of interest. According to Robin Walker, that's something that again will be monitored by the community.
Clearly the Heavy is excited. Also, on fire.
"Some of the things we've shipped in the past have in a couple cases been deliberate data-gathering on our part to find out are we crazy here," Walker said. "The community itself has a good understanding of what's good and what's bad and to some extent the system here is the ultimate in connecting the community feedback system to the content being released."
Gabe Newell added, "Even down to the level of individual items there's now there's way more opportunity to the community to signal 'this is cool' and 'this is lame.' I know the five people that were involved in this first release are incredibly interested now in how they can build on this success. They're going to be very responsive to what they see, in terms of people purchasing stuff and people talking about it, they're going to look at that in a very fine-grained way and get information back pretty quickly, 'Oh I correctly interpreted what people are saying' or 'Oh, actually they don't want more alligator stuff.'"
One question dangling off the end of this issue is: now that Valve considers the system a success, how widespread will it be throughout other Valve products?
"We tend not to, somewhat annoyingly to some of our customers, not do the thing we did before over and over again in exactly the same say," Newell said. "It's hard to predict how we'll use this new information. As I'm reminded of on an almost daily basis, we seemed to be really excited about that episodic thing with [Half-Life 2] Episode One and Episode Two, and then we've gone completely radio silent subsequently. Sometimes it's even dangerous for us to predict what we'll do next.
"We certainly recognize that this is very interesting, that we need to think about the implications of this for anything we do." According to Newell, that could include single-player or multiplayer experiences.
And since the Half-Life Episodes were brought up, we had to ask: any update on Episode 3? "Gabe opened the door and I'll shut it," Valve VP of Marketing Doug Lombardi said after a round of laughter.
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