Team Fortress 2 and economics

Hitting 1000 hrs of playtime in a video-game must mean that it’s important enough to warrant a blog post dedicated to it, right? I hope so. I acquired the game in summer 2008 and have been playing on and off ever since. It is easily the video game that I have poured in the most amount of time into and seven years later, to this day, I still find it exciting to hop in to a server and play.

At it’s core, Team Fortress 2 is a class-based shooter. You pick one of nine classes and play to accomplish an objective with your teammates while armed with various weapons. There are tons of class-based synergies that are made to complement one another and it makes for some very dynamic gameplay with tons of variety.

Over the years, Valve has graciously been updating the game for free, adding in edible items as weapons such as sandwiches, jars of urine, and milk. Hats, medals, jackets, and other cosmetics made their way in as well. Lots of new gamemodes, maps, weapons, taunts, and items are continually added even to this day, all of which ultimately keep the game feeling fresh and new every year.

Perhaps the most incredible thing about the game is that it has its own economy. After the game became free-to-play in 2011, an in-game store launched from where players can purchase virtual items for real-world money. These items can also be crafted from metal, which is made by combining items found in random drops. Supply crates are also found in random drops. Keys can be purchased to open the crates, which can contain rare, unusual, or strange items.

With no hesitation, the economy quickly grew into a robust machine which got so big that Valve needed to hire its own economist. Players started trading items with each other at such high frequencies that supply and demand drastically shifted from one day to the next. Metal and keys became the currency in which players exchanged items. Rules, guidelines, and best practices were established for trading. Bots and online trade servers became commonplace by 2013.

Now in 2015, the supply of metal has increased to such high amounts (thanks to the accumulated random drops over time) that it is almost worth nothing. In 2011, a key was equivalent to 2 refined metal. Today, it is worth 18 refined metal. Many fear that the TF2 economy is bound to crash, and players are adopting aggressive buy/sell tactics to artificially inflate the value of metal back to where it was.

It blows my mind to think about the fact that this is primarily a casual first-person shooter with a cartoony aesthetic where a player can be asked to make decisions about buying or selling items which can have a microeconomic impact on the game’s economy. This whole thing was an experiment by Valve to better understand player behavior and to test the limits of how much different types of players are really willing to spend on virtual items.

It’s simply fascinating to witness a game with such a simple premise evolve into an economic behemoth over time. I guarantee that no-one could’ve predicted back in 2007 (when the game launched) that it would turn into a game where players spend half their time organizing their items in their backpacks and crafting the right hat or cosmetic to sell in order to gain keys with which they can open their crates.

But it happened. Not all the reception about this strange direction that the game took has been received positively, but the resources devoted by Valve to keep the economy running have truly been impressive. I’m stunned to this day by how I still love playing this game despite all its setbacks and flaws.

I’m thrilled to see where it’s headed, as Valve shows no signs of stopping the free updates anytime soon. Perhaps even more, I’m excited to see what Valve does with all the data points that they’ve gathered through years of experimentation in TF2.