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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. A lot of people dismiss TF2’s hats as one of those weird internet phenomena that only obsessives really care about.
#Tf2 hats in real life free#
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.
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.