Team Fortress 2 has been constantly getting updates with new items and modes. Why? American video game developer, Valve Software, has been using this game as a resource since its release in 2007.
While the updates have been gratifying for the gamers, the company has been using it as a tool to prepare for the future, Gamasutra said.
Robin Walker, lead designer of Team Fortress 2, said in an interview to Gamasutra. He said that Valve had used the game as a "testbed" for newer ideas that will help the company in the future, though its main objective is to expand and support the audience base.
"Our secondary goal [with Team Fortress 2] was to see if we could explore specific game and business design spaces that we felt were potentially a requirement for the long-term survival of our company," Walker said.
One of those that Valve experimented with Team Fortress 2 was the massively multiplayer online market. Valve wanted to know what made those games click.
"[When the game shipped], MMOs were the dominant story in the industry, and one concern we had was that we might not be able to survive if we didn't build one," Walker said.
"We didn't think we were ready to undertake that, but we did think that we might be able to build some pieces of one, learning enough so that if or when we did need to build one, we had less risk on the table. We decided that persistent item design and storage seemed like a reasonable amount of risk for us to bite off, and could be made to fit into TF2's gameplay," he added.
A few years later MMOs became less popular and there was a new trend - free-to-play and microtransaction-based games.
This time too Team Fortress 2 was taken as a tester and in June 2011, the game was made free-to-play.
This move by Valve was productive. There was a manifold increase in its revenue. It also helped the company when they rolled out Dota 2, for which they gained the expertise needed to roll out a free-to-play model for it.
Apart from Team Fortress 2 being valuable to the company, it also made good profits. This has resulted in the studio being adaptive to market changes. It has become a research tool for future projects.
"The thought that if we hadn't done it, we'd be here today without any data or experience with service based monetization strategies is quite terrifying," Walker said.
