Team Fortress 2 sees 5x user bump post-F2P

By Fred Dutton Published 24 October, 2011

20-30 per cent spend money.

Valve's multiplayer FPS Team Fortress 2 has seen its user base increase by a factor of five since it adopted the free-to-play model earlier this year.

Valve boss Gabe Newell made the revelation at a tech event in Seattle, as reported by GeekWire.

He added that the proportion of those users who go on to spend money in the game is leagues ahead of the free-to-play average.

"When we talk to partners who do free-to-play," he explained, "a lot of people see about a two to three per cent conversion rate of the people in their audience who actually buy something, and then with Team Fortress 2, which looks more like Arkham Asylum in terms of the user profile and the content, we see about a 20 to 30 percent conversion rate of people who are playing those games who buy something.

"So 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, with apparently much broader participation than you would see out of something like FarmVille."

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About Fred Dutton

Fred Dutton is Eurogamer's US news editor, based in Washington DC.

Read more articles from Fred by visiting the Fred Dutton archive page.

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Comments (3) Latest comment 7 months ago

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  • MattEdWithCheese #1 7 months ago

    Yeah, installed this a few weeks ago, one of the few Multiplayers FPSs I enjoy!

  • epiazk #2 7 months ago

    TF2 does a decent job of micro-transactions to be fair, the scoreboard never felt tilted towards those dropping 50 bucks, and the game suited the shopping mall feel all these shooters have anyway. F2P is fine in its area, its area being facebook.

    (Off-topic : Bioware you prostitute, how I loath you. When you took Black Isles sizable load and produced offspring such as BG2.../wipes away a tear. It was terrible for us all when BI passed away, things looked up when you started dating obsidian. Only to leave him for EA's bling sports cars and sire nothing but useless mediocre nobodies.)*

    *TLDR : BIOWARE ARE FA**OTS

  • lambchop #3 7 months ago

    I might have to revisit. Not played for years