A few years back I wrote a little guide on the best way to approach Steam Sales and how to navigate the bewildering array of sale types to get the best deal. It was a popular post, and still occasionally gets pingbacks whenever a new Steam Sale kicks off. It is also, alas, woefully out of date. The Steam of four years ago was a very different place to the Steam of today (there were far fewer anime dating sims, for one thing) and much of the advice contained within my guide is no longer relevant. With that in mind, and considering I missed last Monday’s review, I thought I’d spend half an hour or so writing a new one.

Fortunately this time around it’s much simpler, because Steam is much simpler. Valve doesn’t do timed/flash/daily sales with extra discounts any more, presumably because the number of games has swelled to the point where focusing the profit on a lucky few titles was actually losing them money elsewhere. I’m sure the fact that obsessives like me had figured out their rules and had been gaming the system for a while also factored into that decision. Regardless of the reason, though, today’s Steam sales apply just one level of discount to each participating game, and that’s the discount that applies throughout the lifetime of the sale. If you’re basing it purely on price, this makes the buy/not-buy decision very easy: you can check the sale on the first day and either the discount is worth it or it isn’t, with no other factors muddying the waters.

However. I’ve been a more-or-less willing participant in Steam sales for nearly a decade now, and in recent years especially I’ve come to realise that there’s a commodity far more precious than money involved here: my free time. I’m sure most Steam users have dozens of games that they’ve bought on sale but have barely (or never) played. I have over two hundred. This has always been a problem, but never so much as it is now: the PC games market of 2016 is arguably oversaturated with releases from both AAA and indie developers and everything in between, and even when you take the anime dating sims out of the equation the tiny percentage of these titles that are genuinely worth my time still collectively add up to far more than my actual quantity of free time. The current motivation you have to play something is also an important factor here; too many times in the past I’ve not been in the mood for something right now but picked it up anyway with the intention of playing it a week or a month down the line, only for it to languish in my list of unplayed games years later. There’s just too many good games and it isn’t possible to play them all, to the point where I’d argue that the first rule of Steam sales isn’t anything to do with money, but is actually this:

 1)  Don’t buy anything you’re not going to play within the next couple of days at most, and certainly NEVER buy a game “for later”.

Steam sales are cyclical. The summer and winter sales happen like clockwork every year and show no signs of ever going away. Steam also still does weekend sales for high-profile titles and midweek sales for midrange titles, and the discounts on these are just as good as you’ll find in one of their big sale events. This ensures that the thing you’re interested in will be on sale again in the future, and it’ll likely be cheaper too. If you’re not going to play that game right now you can probably afford to wait the 3 to 6 months it’ll take for it to come up again. I can guarantee you’ll save far more money following this rule than you will gaming the Steam sales any other way.

A legitimate objection to this approach is that I just made the argument that your free time is precious, but what I just suggested basically relies on you checking the Steam store every day. Or it would if we lived in the bad old days; fortunately the Steam of today is pretty smart about trying to separate you from your money any way it can, which brings me to the second rule of Steam sales.

2) Use Steam’s wishlist to keep track of games you’re interested in.

Steam’s wishlist is ostensibly a way for friends to see which games you want and potentially gift them to you if they’re feeling particularly generous. It works fine for this, but the real value of the wishlist is that whenever anything on it goes on sale Steam will let you know by sending you an email. This ensures that you don’t have to faff about checking the store daily – be warned, though, that you won’t get these emails when a big sale event kicks off, presumably because you’d end up being spammed with dozens of them depending on how much stuff is on the wishlist.

The wishlist is also useful for preventing any interesting games you find from being lost in the raging torrent of anime dating sims. Steam might be the only online storefront in the world that is actually worse than Amazon for general browsing purposes, so this is an important function.

3) Beware of seemingly-big discounts on expensive games.

I have some sad news: after nearly two decades of inflation-proof RRPs the sticker price on AAA PC releases is finally going up. It’s rare you’ll find one selling on release for less than £40 these days. Still, there are savings to be had despite this; if you do find yourself buying an AAA PC title on release my advice is to actually not do that directly through Steam. It used to be a really good idea to check Amazon for box copies that usually came with a tenner or so knocked off the RRP; since they were usually integrated with Steam anyway you lost nothing by doing this. Unfortunately — barring Collector’s Editions and the like — physical copies of PC games are a dying breed, making Amazon less reliable for savings these days (it’s still worth checking though). Recently the best approach I’ve found for buying Steam games on release has been to do it through Green Man Gaming, who let you buy one game for 20% off each month via a rotating discount code, and if that game is integrated with Steam they’ll usually offer a Steam code — do pay attention to that last point, though, as you might end up with a code for Origin or Uplay instead, and while competition has forced them into being far better systems than they were in the past I appreciate they’re still carrying around a bit of a stigma. As for GMG themselves I’ve bought 20-odd games from them over the last four years with no problems whatsoever, so they’re pretty reliable as far as I’m concerned.

But this is a post about Steam sales, and the point I wanted to make here is that while the RRP on release has gone up, it doesn’t stay up for very long. Unless you’re talking about Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto there’s a very high chance that the RRP will have been slashed down to £30 or less within six months of release. That 25% saving on a £40 game might look attractive now, but bear in mind that you’re still paying £30 and it’ll likely be cheaper very soon. The RRP is actually more likely to go down than the discount level these days, in fact, which brings me to rule 4.

4) Discount bands aren’t quite as generous as they used to be.

A natural consequence of Steam abolishing daily and flash sales is that game prices don’t have to be cut quite so much to participate. You’ll still see 75% off a lot of things, especially older games or package deals, but 80/90% off is mostly reserved for games that a developer or publisher is trying to squeeze a few last pennies out of. 66% is now a “decent” level of discount, and even 50% is reasonable, especially if the RRP is set at a sane level rather than an artificially inflated one (see rule 3 above). Basically, don’t be too picky about holding out for a deeper discount later as you’ll probably be waiting a while. This forms a positive version of rule 1: if you do want to play the game right now and you’re reasonably happy with its price tag, then don’t faff about and just buy the game now. It’ll be worth the few extra pounds you’d otherwise be saving by waiting, and that goes for things with inflated price tags too. At the end of the day a game is worth exactly the amount you are willing to pay for it, and even £40 is a fine price for a game if you know what you’re getting into and are sure you’ll get a decent amount of enjoyment out of it. In my case I wouldn’t consider paying that much for anything I wasn’t going to get at least 15-20 hours out of, but as long as that’s the case I’ll hand over the money without suffering from even the slightest hint of buyer’s remorse.

I guess the gist of this post is: don’t worry about gaming the sales. If your objective is to simply buy games that you will enjoy playing then it just isn’t necessary any more. Everyone mentally separates things into “Buy on release” and “Buy on sale”, but for anything in the latter category it’s your gut feeling that’ll help you out more than anything else. Anyway, your free time is far too precious to waste playing games that were cheap when you could have been playing games that were fun. Ideally you’ll be playing something that’s both — even if it’s an anime dating sim — but aside from using the Wishlist there’s very little effort involved in achieving that overlap – because it’s largely out of your hands now. That’s modern Steam sales for you.

The post Steam Sales, Again appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Getting your game on Steam is an incredibly big deal for an indie developer. Valve’s combination digital distribution/social gaming network serves over 5.5 million concurrent users every day, and that number is continuing to trend steadily upwards with every passing month. This is a huge potential market – far larger than an indie dev would be able to reach on limited or no marketing funds – and Steam access can make all the difference between ridiculously successful sales figures and going out of business.  At the same time obtaining that access is a rather murky and opaque process that can be rather baffling to everyone outside of Valve, with games being rejected or accepted for Steam in a manner that seems somewhat arbitrary to say the very least.  I say “is” rather than “was”, because despite the introduction of Valve’s Greenlight community voting system the process is still rather uneven.

Before Greenlight, nobody was really sure how the selection of Steam games worked. Confidentiality agreements and Valve’s inherent secretiveness mean there’s not much information floating around about what metrics Valve use to select games for release; aside from the odd snippet, like Vic Davis having his games refused because they were “not a good fit”, and Valve’s repeated refusal of various pinball games because apparently nobody wants to play pinball games on a PC¹ despite titles like Zen Pinball and Pinball Arcade selling by the bucketload on the consoles, there’s not a huge amount to go on. Profit motive is clearly a factor because Steam isn’t a charity, and unless you’re a pinball game Valve are at least not remotely snobbish here: if your game experiences a decent level of commercial success away from Steam then your chances of getting onto the service are that much higher because Valve can smell the huge piles of money to be made. However, this isn’t a huge help to indie developers operating on shoestring budgets, who may not necessarily have the cash on hand to nurse a game through the difficult early stages of its life to the point where Valve finally relent and open up the Steam gates.

This is partly the reason why the Greenlight system was introduced. It’s a way for indie developers to prove there’s a significant demand for their game without having to go through the hassle of actually demonstrating this in the marketplace. It’s also a way of taking some of the pressure off of whoever it is at Valve who trawls through the Steam submissions, because the service – and the indie PC scene — has grown to the point where they can no longer effectively curate it in-house.  People vote for the games they want to see on Steam. Once a game has enough votes Valve will take a look at it, and if they like what they see they’ll give it a free pass and put it on Steam when it’s released. It’s a neat idea. In theory, anyway.

In practice, Greenlight is just muddying the waters even more. Let’s deconstruct that two-sentence description of the Greenlight process and see how many holes we can poke in it, shall we?

“People vote for the games they want to see on Steam.” Right, so here you have two problems. One is that votes on Greenlight will not necessarily equate to sales once the game is released, so Greenlight vote totals are rather fluffy indicators of a game’s potential commercial value at the best of times. The other is that the games running successful Greenlight campaigns are the ones which are able to grab a significant quantity of press exposure prior to their release which drive a constant stream of voters to their Greenlight pages. The number of people randomly trawling through Steam Greenlight looking for hidden gems is not large; it probably used to be larger, but I imagine some people have given up after being forced to rate the umpteenth 16-bit platformer “homage”/Slenderman game. (I know I certainly have.) If you want to experience success on Greenlight then you need that off-site exposure to make yourself shine amongst the huge, huge piles of dross that make up Greenlight submissions, and I think this is a problem because if you can rack up a substantial vote total entirely through off-site positive buzz then the chances are your game didn’t really need to go through the Greenlight process anyway. Looking at the forty-odd games that have been greenlit so far there’s maybe five of them that wouldn’t have had a decentl chance of making it onto Steam pre-Greenlight. That’s not a good hit rate.

“Once a game has enough votes.” But what qualifies as enough? Nobody really seems to know. Pinball Arcade has been bouncing around the latter half of the top 100 ever since it was put up on Greenlight, but this has yet to convince Valve to let it onto the service. There certainly doesn’t seem to be any concrete threshold; I suspect that what there actually is are a couple of people at Valve who regularly check the top Greenlight games, using it as a way of reducing their sample size of games to curate rather than as a hard-and-fast indicator of what might be successful in the future.

“they’ll give it a free pass and put it on Steam when it’s released.”  Again, “when it’s released” is a rather nebulous term which exacerbates Steam’s already niggling problem with quality control. You see, for a service which is apparently so exclusive, Valve has released some downright broken and/or unfinished games in the last year or two. You probably heard about The War Z being yanked from the service a couple of months back for being blatantly unfinished; space 4X Legends of Pegasus suffered a similar (if less conspicuous) fate in September 2012 and is highly unlikely to return after the developer went out of business, while Sword of the Stars 2 – a game released on Steam in October 2011 – was finally given an “all clear” rating by the developer (i.e. they considered it to be finished, although I understand many of the people who bought it disagree) a full year later in October 2012. These are all games which did not go through Greenlight and which if anything illustrate the problem with Valve continuing to handle Steam submissions themselves; things like this are going to happen when you have so many games and so few people dealing with them.

Greenlight won’t solve that problem, though. Towns was one of the first games to get greenlit and it showed up on the Steam store scant days later, which I must say surprised me greatly because I’d found the game on a random trawl of Desura a month or two beforehand and it was clearly labelled with a version number that was substantially less than 1.0. Unless the developers had managed to rush it out of its beta state inside of a month it was highly unlikely that what was on the Steam store was actually the finished article, and it was more likely that they’d just shoved their current build up on the Steam store in an attempt to bring in some money. Even though Towns is described as “continually being developed and updated to bring you the best experience possible!” I found this a rather shady business tactic to say the least, and steered well clear even though it looks like the sort of game that would otherwise be right up my alley. From what I’ve read on forums and whatnot following Towns’ release, I made the right move.

So Greenlight as it stands does not solve any of the problems with the Steam submission process. All it does is add an additional hoop for indie developers to jump through which makes Valve’s job substantially easier – since they no longer have to look at every game submitted to the service, just the highest rated ones on Greenlight – but which can hardly be said to be opening up Steam to all and sundry. The weirdest thing about Greenlight, though, is that it seems to run in parallel with the regular Steam submission process rather than replacing it. I wouldn’t expect Ubisoft or Activision to have to submit their games to Greenlight, but I must confess to being slightly puzzled as to how this masterpiece managed to sidestep Greenlight and go straight to the New Releases list on the Steam store. If anything, Greenlight has made getting your game on Steam an increasingly Byzantine process. To their credit it looks like there are people at Valve who know this, which is why they’re talking about (in an ideal universe) genuinely opening up the platform to anyone who wants to sell a game through it. This would throw any notion of quality control to the wind, but as we’ve seen Steam is inevitably trending that way anyway, so it may be just as well. And hey, Valve would still have some oversight of the service through dint of running it. They’re not going to give up their money machine that easily.

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The post On Steam Greenlight. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Josh says

You should do a blog post about how to buy things effectively on Steam.

Okay.

Steam sales are cyclical and predictable. Valve have been experimenting with the structure for a while now, making people jump through hoops for free games and whatnot, but their last three sales have been devoid of these metasale elements and have followed roughly the same pattern:

• Nearly everything in the store that wasn’t released in the last month goes on sale for anywhere between 25-75% off.

• There will be a set of daily deals where games are particularly heavily discounted for 48 hours.

• A relatively new thing are the flash sales, which are the same as daily deals except they’re available for a much shorter period of time.

• Finally there’s a sidebar where the community can vote on one of three games to go on sale for the next 12 hours or whatever.

The set structure and rules of the sale are useful because while it’s designed to look ephemeral and unpredictable with all those timers slowly ticking down to zero, if you know how it works you can guarantee yourself the best bargain possible following just two simple rules.

The regular discounts are merely there to make the dailies look even better, but they can still lure in people who are unfamiliar with how Steam works. The fact of the matter is that unless you somehow lack the patience to wait until the end of the sale to see if whatever it is you’re after turns up as a daily, there is absolutely no reason to buy anything that isn’t prominently featured on the front page of the store as either a daily or a flash sale. If you do, the chances are that it will end up with a larger discount later on and you’ll feel stupid for not waiting. This has led to the following piece of received wisdom, which differs from most received wisdom in that it’s actually correct: Never buy anything during a Steam sale unless it’s a daily or it’s the last day of the sale.

Right, so now you’re checking Steam every day to see if the game you want has gone on sale yet, which is exactly what Valve want you to be doing. The dailies and flash sales are the same thing with different timers attached, and in fact there’s an awful lot of bleedover between the two: things which are dailies will often turn up later as flash sales and vice versa, for the same discount. Dailies and flash sales carry the maximum possible discount for that particular Steam sale, so if you see what you want come up as a daily or a flash sale you’re safe buying it. The only way you’re going to get it any cheaper is by waiting six months for the next Steam sale.

The stuff in the sidebar also carries the maximum possible discount, but since it’s slaved to the whim of the Steam user base nothing good ever makes it through the voting process. Seriously, during the Summer sale Bioshock won the vote one day; I forget what else was up for consideration but I can guarantee you it was better than a five year-old FPS.

Now, if you stick to the above guidelines you will never end up paying more than you have to for a Steam game during that particular sale. If you take a slightly longer-term view then things become a little more complex since the price of games will fluctuate depending on how well a particular game is doing in the marketplace/how that game’s publisher wants to play it, but in general you can use the level of discount to gauge how much cheaper the game is likely to be in the future. There are also games that aren’t high-profile enough to feature as dailies, so if you’re stuck on the last day of the sale wondering whether or not something is worth buying this is how you do it.

25-40% off – Usually reserved for new games released within the last three months. I personally wouldn’t go near anything in this bracket, since I either bought it on release for close to full price, or else I know it’s going to be 50% off or more at some point in the next six months. You only pay this price if it’s something you want now now now.

50-66% off – A good bargain, but with some wiggle room for a larger discount in the near future. Certainly you run the risk of having it crop up again in a month or two as a weekend deal/midweek madness for 75% off. Still, even if this did happen you’d be losing a few pounds at most, so it’s a question of whether or not you want to wait and see for the sake of a small amount of cash.

75% off or more – The absolute cheapest it will ever be on Steam. The only way for this game to get cheaper is if the developer/publisher reduces the base RRP — which does happen, but which is rather outside Steam’s purview. Discounts of more than 75% on things that are actually good are very rare, so you should treat 75% off as the best possible scenario and not worry about whether or not it might come up at 80% later on.

And that’s it, really. The only way to do better than this is to pay attention to really long term trends in overall game pricing (i.e. over the last half-decade or so) , which I doubt anyone who isn’t me really has the time or inclination to be bothered with. Hopefully this will save somebody some money, or at least ensure they spend that money on two games instead of one.

(Incidentally if it’s not a sale period and you buy something for full price you’re probably making a mistake. Since it’s publishers who set the prices Steam will be retailing at full RRP; meanwhile internet retailers who still sell games in boxes will have gotten a discount for buying in bulk and will pass some of that on to their customer, knocking a few pounds off of the RRP.)

The post Steam Sales: A True Strategy Game. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is a story about a hat.

Thanks to its focus on hats and a real money shop in which you can buy said hats, Team Fortress 2 tends to be the butt of a lot of jokes about being the world’s premier hat simulator. With 235 hats currently in the game along with many, many variations on the theme – Strange hats, Unusual hats, Vintage hats, paintable hats – these jokes do have a seed of truth in them, for all that Valve (presumably) use the proceeds from hat sales to create massive, regular and entirely free injections of new content for the game, which itself went free-to-play a couple of years back. A lot of people dismiss TF2’s hats  as one of those weird internet phenomena that only obsessives really care about. This would be a mistake, but it’s true that a casual player of the game like myself doesn’t usually give hat trading any significant thought. However, a short while ago I happened to have my attention directed towards the hat economy purely by chance, and what I discovered absolutely fascinated me.

It all started a few months back when I got an unsolicited friend request on Steam from a user who appeared to be a complete stranger to me. We had no friends in common, no groups in common, he had no name that I recognised – there was absolutely nothing to link us in any way. I declined the request, not really wanting to deal with the sort of person who would just send out random invites to strangers, but I was nevertheless puzzled at just what would drive someone to do this. Steam isn’t like other social media; there’s no e-cred for having a zillion friends on there, and I hadn’t put enough time into TF2 to think anyone would be interested in the paltry selection of items visible in my Steam inventory.

That is, until an actual real friend of mine also got a friend request from the same user a few minutes later. Being a bit more outgoing than I am (also he may have been drunk at the time) he decided to engage the guy in conversation to find out why on earth he was pestering multiple people like this. And the answer he got back was fairly surprising: he was a TF2 trader, and he wanted Bill’s hat.

This was what first piqued my interest: that despite not putting all that much time into TF2, and despite having a rather threadbare inventory, I could still possess an item valuable enough to make somebody pelt the owners of it with random friend requests in the hopes of persuading them to part with it. That’s a lot of effort to go to for a hat.  Previously I’d thought that TF2 trading took place amongst a relatively small clique of players – just the people who actively offered and responded to trade requests in server chat, as well as those who used specialist trading websites to seek out specific items – but this was the first evidence I’d had that it might go a little bit deeper. That the hats in TF2 might have some kind of intrinsic worth that went beyond their aesthetic quality as vanity items or their completionist value as part of a collection.

Why is Bill’s hat in particular so valuable? What gives it its value? What would drive somebody to do the internet equivalent of cold-calling just so that they could acquire more Bill’s hats? To answer this I had to delve into many of the specifics of the way TF2 trading works, the TF2 item system, and the curious economy that has materialised around both.

As a very quick primer, items in TF2 can be acquired by picking them up from “drops” during play (actually a semi-random timed reward system), by crafting them through the game’s crafting system, by buying them from the in-game shop, by trading with another player for them, or by getting them as a promotional bonus for buying/pre-ordering some other game on Steam. However, not all items can be acquired through all methods. Some items cannot be traded for. Some cannot be crafted. Some do not drop during play. Certain one-off promotional items have effectively had their supply cut off, leaving a fixed number of those items in the system which will never increase or decrease. These different factors can come together to make some items very hard to get, and it’s the difficulty in acquiring the items which gives them their inherent value, as you’d expect. After all, rarer is always more valuable. Past this, though, the TF2 economy behaves in some very strange and unexpected ways.

One of the keys to the TF2 economy is, well, keys. Keys are the item underpinning nearly all of the transactions that go on in TF2’s trading backend. Keys have a fixed value since they can be bought in the in-game shop for £2. You’re supposed to use them to unlock the many, many crates that you’ll pick up as a simple consequence of playing the game for an hour or two; doing this will consume the key and reward you with a random item from a set list determined by the particular crate you’re trying to unlock. However, since they’re a tradable item which has this fixed value attached to them, the key has also become the de facto currency of TF2. You can use keys to pay for many of the more valuable items being offered up for trade on websites such as this one, and the fact that the key is such an ubiquitous medium of exchange means that it allows direct comparisons between the values of two seemingly unconnected items. The key means that TF2’s economy – which started out as a pure barter economy, remember – actually has a common monetary unit.

A second, possibly even more important element of TF2’s economy are the one-off promotional items I mentioned above. These are items which were awarded to players for participating in a time-limited event and which can no longer be acquired by any method. As a highly relevant example, 107,147 TF2 players preordered Left 4 Dead 2 on Steam prior to its release. This means 107,147 TF2 players received a Bill’s hat as a reward for preordering. Three years after L4D2’s release there are still 107,147 Bill’s hats in the game. However, because Bill’s hats cannot be created or destroyed by any means, and because they can be traded to other players, Bill’s hats have a much higher key value than other hats that are far rarer numerically but which can be created through crafting or picked up through drops. This constant expansion of the supply for such hats not only dilutes their value as they become more common, but the potential for the quantities of these hats to eventually outstrip the number of Bill’s hats in the game has been noted by the trading community and factored into their key value.

Let’s look at some numbers. There are 107,147 Bill’s hats in circulation. A Bill’s hat can currently be had for as little as eight keys, although a more common price is nine keys, or eight keys plus some refined metal (a key is currently worth 2.66 refined metal and so refined metal is used as small change. Crazy, huh?) Painted versions of Bill’s hats increase the price by one or two keys since paint has to be bought in the in-game shop and it costs a fair bit of real money. By comparison there are only 6,904 Warsworn helmets in the game, but because they are craftable and the supply is increasing the going price for a Warsworn is just three refined metal, or 1.12 keys.

It doesn’t stop there, either. Other promotional items with fixed supplies carry even higher premiums, to the point where many traders will no longer directly accept keys in exchange for them even though keys determine their value (as an analogue, imagine trying to pay for your weekly grocery shopping with a huge bucket of small change). You remember the 2010 Steam Christmas sale with the seemingly-usless coal? And that seven lumps of coal could be traded in for a special TF2 hat, the BMOC? You‘ll probably wish you’d done that now because BMOCs are worth 16-18 keys. The Earbuds — a promotional reward for TF2 players who participated in the game’s launch on Mac — are worth 25-27 keys, or three Bill’s hats. And finally there’s Max’s Severed Head, released to tie in with one of Telltale’s awful desecrations of a beloved Lucasarts property and which goes for a staggering 52 keys. Or two Earbuds. Or four BMOCs.

Now, that the supply of these items is fixed is probably not responsible for their full value in the eyes of TF2 traders. I suspect that a large part of their worth is based on the simple fact that the community as a whole perceives them as valuable, desirable items. In other words, much like modern coinage, they are valuable simply because society agrees that they are an acceptable medium for representing the value of goods and labour. However, if there was no limit on the supply of these items they would be useless in such a role. With keys the limit is provided by the real-money requirement to acquire a key in the first place as well as the fact that keys are constantly flowing out of the system as they are used to unlock crates. With these promotional items, the limit is an actual physical one on the number of items available.

Intriguingly, though, the supply of these promotional items in circulation is actually decreasing. Once people manage to trade for a Bill’s hat or a set of Earbuds they prove strangely reluctant to let it go, and so a significant quantity of traded items effectively form part of a player’s savings. Here, though, there’s a definite disconnect between the real-life economy and the virtual economy. If you save real money it will likely be stored in a bank account somewhere, but it won’t just be sitting there; the bank should, in theory, be taking your money and putting back to work in the system on their behalf while paying you a healthy rate of interest in exchange. In TF2, players hoarding items like this is more akin to stuffing your savings into a sock which you keep under your bed. It’s not exactly helpful to the economy as a whole, and the gradual decrease in supply is creating a slow upward pressure on the price of these promotional items.

One thing I was concerned about when writing this piece was that it was all very well and good trawling trading sites for the approximate current prices of TF2 items, but that all this would give me was a snapshot of the current state of the economy. It would tell me nothing about what it was like six months ago, or a year ago, or three years ago. I had no clue how the economy had changed over time. To try and rectify this I got Jim to put me in touch with Losty, a TF2 player who is fairly heavily involved in item trading. Losty told me that Earbuds have increased in price by 50% since they were introduced, while the Christmas BMOC hats were also steadily creeping up in terms of key cost. Interestingly I got the impression that Bill’s hats had suffered a somewhat smaller relative price increase compared to the other limited edition items, and I think that might be because the larger quantity of Bill’s hats in the system — when compared with Earbuds  (44,532) and BMOCs (12,453) – is cushioning the decrease in supply.

(It’s also probably worth taking a brief look at the number of keys in circulation. There’s a staggering 280,192 of them sitting in people’s inventories, but only 7,208 — or 2.6% — of those have been acquired through trading, suggesting the number of keys actually circulating through the system is comparatively small. It’s certainly a much lower percentage than the 18.6% of Bill’s hats that have been acquired through trading, and would seem to indicate that keys lend their fixed value to other items without often being involved in trades themselves. I interpret it as TF2 traders either preferring not to get real money involved in the system all that much, or just spending it on other things such as paint. It’s not really a fair comparison because keys can be bought and used up while Bills hats are static, but the quantity of keys that are being traded is still rather smaller than I was expecting.)

Of course many of the hats that can be found up for trade can also be purchased in the in-game store for a fixed sum, effectively putting a cap on their value in terms of keys. Certainly there is no hat in the store (that I could find, anyway) with anywhere near the asking price of eighteen pounds a Bill’s hat would appear to demand in equivalent key value, and this is going to act to keep the key cost of many of the mundane hats down. This is why I used a comparison hat – the Warsworn helmet – with many of the same qualities as the Bill’s and which isn’t available for sale in the store, but which is craftable and thus has a supply that isn’t fixed.

Finally there’s the story of refined metal. Refined metal is acquired through a convoluted crafting system that basically requires 18 unwanted weapons in 9 matched pairs to create one refined metal. You’ll pick up maybe one or two weapons per hour of playing TF2 – less if you play constantly – and so crafting even one refined metal is a huge pain for a single player to do. This “labour” cost, for want of a better term, is part of what gives refined metal its value as small change in the TF2 economy. It has other uses besides  acting as money, as it constitutes a required ingredient of many of the higher-level crafting recipes in the game. In particular you can combine three refined metal to make a random hat, and this is interesting to me because most hats are apparently worth about 1.33 refined metal on the open market.  Again, there are probably a number of factors at work here – not least that a hat crafted by somebody else will likely have a “Crafted by PLAYER” in the item description which gives it that slightly-worn second hand quality, like a book with somebody else’s name written inside the cover – but it’s nevertheless a strong indicator that TF2 traders put a far higher emphasis on the potential use of an item over the end product. If you craft together those three metal you have a small chance of getting an awesome hat, and a much larger chance that you’ll get a crap hat that you’ll only be able to flog for less than half the cost of the materials required to make it. It does say to me that the random element of crafting hats also provides much of the value of the metal; that while the metal is unused, that small chance of getting an awesome hat is a tangible thing that has worth. It’s kind of like gambling in that regard.

The TF2 economy is a surprisingly robust entity that mirrors real-world economies in a number of interesting ways, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have its silly side. Since keys carry an actual monetary value and the value of many other items in the game can be expressed in terms of keys, it’s possible to very crudely put a number on just how valuable your TF2 backpack actually is. Mine is apparently worth just 63 dollars (and I imagine most of that is locked up in Bill’s hat). This guy’s on the other hand is worth $26,000. That’s not to say that he has $26,000 of liquid assets floating around in there, of course; if he ever tries to liquidate his portfolio I very much hope he’s prepared to accept $26,000 worth of keys in lieu of anything that would actually be of any use in a post-TF2 world, because while the world does contain people willing to pay $1,500 for a hat there can’t be that many of them out there.

The one question I haven’t addressed here is the one I asked at the start of the post, and which has only become even more intriguing in light of what I’ve learned here: why do people spend so much of their free time trading for hats in an online FPS? I asked Losty what the appeal was for him, and his reply was this:

For me it’s because I WANT IT ALL. OK, maybe not. For fun, my day off work is Tuesday and everyone else is at work so I started going to a trade server, and now it’s like a drug, a drug that can be worn on your head. Plus it keeps me playing TF2.

which I think means is that it’s more about the act of trading for him rather than any actual hats he might get out of it. I can relate to that; trading games and business sims wouldn’t be nearly as fun if we didn’t get some kind of rush out of buying low and selling high to acquire desirable items for the best possible price, and this carries the added element that you’re dealing with actual people rather than a brainless computer with no business acumen whatsoever. Even if TF2 hat trading still doesn’t sound quite like my cup of tea I can certainly see why people might do it now that I’ve discovered just how complex the economy behind it actually is.

After spending this evening trawling the TF2 trading sites I’ve come away with it for a new appreciation for what Valve have created here. How much of it was intentional? Did they really mean for keys to become adopted as the game’s currency when they introduced them? Did they know that Bill’s hat would become a lynchpin of the economy when they were planning the release of L4D2? I don’t know. I doubt it. However I do think that Valve as a company have a definite talent for instinctively identifying new systems and mechanics that seem stupid and unnecessary when they launch, but which are widely seen as utterly indispensible five years later. They may not have foreseen the impact Bill’s hat would have, but they were savvy enough to realise that the Mann-conomy update would introduce a viable business model that’d let them run the game as free-to-play for the foreseeable future. They are visionaries, for lack of a better word, and I’m entirely unsurprised they’ve hired a bona fide economist to study the economic systems they’ve created – both in-game and out of it – and give them some idea of what they should come up with next. I don’t know what it will be, but I can guarantee you this: no matter what it is, it’ll be be so subtly revolutionary that in a couple of years time we’ll be wondering how we ever got along without it. The hat economy is yet more proof, if any were still needed, that Valve are probably the most innovative developer in the videogame industry today. You dismiss it at your peril.

Many thanks to Losty for his invaluable insights into TF2 trading. Also thanks to Jim for his help in sourcing the various links scattered throughout this piece, as well as for putting me in touch with Losty in the first place.

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And a final footnote: my PhD is in physics, not economics. I have a smattering of advanced economics knowledge but mostly I understand things on the basis of supply and demand. Fortunately I happen to think the TF2 economy runs almost purely on a supply and demand basis, which is why I’m comfortable writing this article, but if you think I’ve got it wrong and that there’s something rather more nuanced going on here then please feel free to correct me in the comments.

EDIT: Okay so, first correction. I get quite adamant that the supply of Bill’s hats can’t decrease when in fact players can destroy any item in their backpack if they want to. However, given the absence of somebody going around buying up Bill’s hats en masse just so that they can destroy them (kind of like a really crappy version of Goldfinger) I don’t think this is going to have an appreciable effect on the total number of Bill’s hats in the game.

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