Anyone remember that economist Valve hired back in 2012?
Yanis Varoufakis was always a big name in international economics, with a number of successful books and a popular blog on the subject, but he first appeared under the gaming communities’ radar when he became Valve’s own economist-in-residence, acting as a private consultant for the company.
Well, Varoufakis was recently elected the new Financial Minister of Greece.
Team Fortress 2’s annual Halloween celebration is here, and it’s got the works!
This is an editorial by Aabicus which analyses the successfulness of free-to-play games in the gaming industry with relation to Team Fortress 2. All views expressed here are his own.
The Free-to-play model is the current trend in multiplayer online games at the moment, most frequently seen in MMOs, MOBAs and shooters. Since several high-profile games (including Team Fortress 2) proved the model worked, the gaming industry have seen a staggering amount of F2P releases, some of whom keep their revenue-enhancing devices subtle and others who make real-world money the most valuable resource a player can have.
Man, what I love the most about Halloween is the spooky mood I get in. You know what I’m saying? Like, for instance, I feel spooky enough to pull of insane spooks that would be considered too spooky outside of Halloween.
It’s all good on Halloween though, because everyone has already been spooked by the Halloween event in Team Fortress 2, which is dubbed every year Scream Fortress. Yes, people. It’s that time of the year. The annual Team Fortress 2 Halloween update is live!
Way back in May of 2009, Valve introduced Team Fortress players to the Sniper vs. Spy Update, which at the time was TF2’s most ambitious game update yet – providing both the Sniper and Spy classes with three significant new weapons each, as well as several new maps, alongside a brand new gamemode. But this update brought us something else, something which would leave a lasting impact not only on TF2 itself, but on all of Valve’s future work, as a whole… hats.
Yes, the Sniper vs. Spy Update was when TF2 got its 9 first rare cosmetic headgear items – one for each playable class. Since then, Valve (alongside numerous item designers from the Team Fortress community) have added 259 more hats to TF2- and so, by now, most people have forgotten about those 9 original hats… which makes it all the more interesting that Valve has actually decided to permanently retire them from the game’s item circuit.
Though we may take it for granted these days, Steam Trading might just represent one of the most significant innovations in the field of in-game community interaction in recent years. Trading games, coupons, and items, all within the Steam community. The Team Fortress 2 economy alone was estimated last year to be worth 20 million dollars – and that was a very conservative estimate, made only 6 months after the game had become free-to-play.
And a lot of people have made some a lot of money by buying and selling these in-game items. But since so much of that activity takes place outside the Steam ecosystem (in the so-called gray market), it could be quite difficult to track what’s going on in the marketplace at large. But it seems as though Valve have found a way to remedy that problem in a pretty unique way. Read on!
