So yes, hats.
The latest conference chat to take place at Valve’s Steam Dev Days event was about in-game economies (hats,) and confirmed what a lot of people probably already suspected; that Team Fortress 2 (hats) are still very popular.
Steamdb.info is, as it was yesterday, collating the information that emerges from the talks, which in this case concerns Valve’s attitude towards microtransactions and user economies.
According to tweets from developers from inside the event, Valve’s approach to microtransactions is pretty straightforward. Avoid creating unhappy customers, because this “trains” people not to spend money. The company says it has a “regret test,” where if players regret using a feature, system or spending money then that system has failed.
User creation is key, and Valve likes to reward those who create “value” (in-game items, maps etc) for others. In the first week of 2014, the company says it paid out $400,000 USD to “content creators” for Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2.
Giving the gift of gifts.
In other mind-boggling stats, 17 million Team Fortress 2 accounts own items, and almost 500,000 compendiums were sold during DOTA 2’s International, adding $1.2 million USD to the prize fund.
Based on all that, we can probably expect Valve’s forthcoming games to adopt very similar models.
