The store system allows players to create new items to sell and submit them to Valve for a rubber stamp of approval. Once approved, statistics and a price point are assigned to the item and the design is then put into the store for purchase. For each item purchased, Valve takes their share of the profits with 25% of the original price going right back to its original creators. Only 25% you say? While it might sound like the community is getting shafted, some players are making some serious moolah from the additional feature. People like Steven Skidmore and Spencer Kern, who amongst others were flown to Valve HQ to pick up their first royalty cheques which have ranged between US $39,000 to $47,000 - not bad considering that these items have only been on sale for the last fortnight.
"I was pretty flabbergasted," said Skidmore. "You don't really assume it would catch on that well. When it did go through and you see the success of it, it shows that this is really the future of gaming, putting the games in the hands of the community."
"When we got here we both estimated what we were going to get," said Kern, "and we were just blown away by how much we actually received. It's astounding to know that that many people took an interest in all these custom items coming out of the community. It's great to see that people actually want to have the community items and that they're not just an afterthought."
Despite the major success of the move, Valve has reiterated its desire to not submit to the practices of forcing players to pay for new game maps. Valve's Managing Director Gabe Newell understands how this has adversely affected some game communities. But while Valve won't make us pay for any new maps, he did acknowledge that the company is interested in coming up with a way to reward the great map designing talent out there in the Team Fortress community:
"If you sell levels, there's a negative externality of that which is you fracture your community around ownership of the level.
One example of an idea, not necessarily one we'll implement, would be that people could buy a badge or some other piece of affinity appearance-altering merchandise that say 'I really like this level,' and that's the way the level designer gets compensated. And someone who has that affinity object gets advantages or distinctions when playing on that level. Coming up with solutions like that is coming up with the designer of these kinds of frameworks. How do you build a system where the community can maximize its contributions to the shared experience."
With the company touting the system as a success, will gamers start to see this practice filter throughout other Valve products?
"We tend not to, somewhat annoyingly to some of our customers, not do the thing we did before over and over again in exactly the same say," Newell said. "It's hard to predict how we'll use this new information. As I'm reminded of on an almost daily basis, we seemed to be really excited about that episodic thing with [Half-Life 2] Episode One and Episode Two, and then we've gone completely radio silent subsequently. Sometimes it's even dangerous for us to predict what we'll do next."
"We certainly recognize that this is very interesting, that we need to think about the implications of this for anything we do."
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