When Valve Software announced the results of Polycount's Team Fortress 2 item-modding contest, the winners were just excited that their creations would be in the popular mulitplayer shooter.
But with the recent introduction of the game's user-created virtual item marketplace, the Mann Co. Store, the winners' items went on sale to the Team Fortress 2 community -- and a 25 percent revenue share to the modders led to a surprising payoff.
Today, Valve said that community content creators Rob Laro, Shawn Spetch, Steven Skidmore, Spencer Kern and Shaylyn Hamm took home initial royalty payments ranging from $39,000 to $47,000 each from the first round of Team Fortress 2 content creation. And these are just the checks from the first few weeks of operation.
Kern told Gamasutra, "By having [user-generated content] implemented in the way that Steam has it, where people are getting monetary gains for the items they put in, it rewards people who put in the good items, who listen to the community and put in the stuff that everyone wants to see in the game. ... It'll bring out the quality artists to do the work."
He added, "It was completely mind-blowing, the size of the return that we're getting on these things."
Skidmore said, "I feel like this is going to open up a whole new level for everyone in general that plays these games who has an interest [in game design]. .. It'll ultimately be better for the industry, attaching the community to the game developer."
Valve said it was going to deposit the royalties in the modders' PayPal accounts, but the revenue from the sales was so high that it exceeded some of the service's limits on deposit size. Valve flew Kern and Skidmore to the developer's Kirkland, WA headquarters to give them the payments in person.
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To Valve boss Gabe Newell, giving content creators a cut of the sales benefits Valve, the modders and the community as a whole. Newell noted that about half of the 250 people currently working at Valve came directly out of the gaming community.
He explained that typically, when gamers in a community have an idea or want to contribute something to the industry in a professional capacity, the path would be to create something interesting and get hired by a game company.
"I think this sort of short circuits that process," he said. "Once people ... realize this is about their community, and that the right people are getting the benefits, ... after a while, they'll say 'this is really how these kinds of communities need to work.'"
He added, "It benefits us because it grows the community, right? These [content creators] benefit, but we benefit too. Team Fortress 2 is a better product because we have community contributions in it. They're going to go off and listen to what the community says about how they can do that better, and we can draft along, as we both benefit."