Oct 22, 2010

Team Fortress 2 - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Jim Rossignol)

Virtual millinery proves to pay off. Valve sent us this on the roaring hat-trade in Team Fortress 2, and the benefits for the community creators:

Five Steam community members participated in the initial round of content creation. Rob Laro, Shawn Spetch, Steven Skidmore, Spencer Kern, and Shaylyn Hamm created items for Team Fortress 2 which were then made available to other community members for purchase from the in-game Mann Co. Store. Today they received checks for the first two weeks of sales, with royalties ranging from $39,000 to $47,000 per person.

“It’s astounding that so many people want to purchase the items that came out of the community,” said Spencer Kern, TF2 community content creator. “The response exceeded my wildest expectations. There really is no doubt at this point that there’s a huge demand for community-created content in TF2 and, hopefully, more games will start to tap into this demand.”

Yep. Astounding is the word.

Oct 21, 2010

Making Team Fortress 2 Hats Turns Out To Be Very Profitable

Team Fortress 2

The recently launched "Mann-conomy" for Team Fortress 2 has quickly become a profitable venture for the community modelers who cranked out new weapons, hats and accessories for Valve's game. Valve just sent out royalty check to creators... and they're big.

Five TF2 community members—Rob Laro, Shawn Spetch, Steven Skidmore, Spencer Kern, and Shaylyn Hamm—created new items for the game ranging from crocodile hats to jars of milk to sleek black rocket launchers, which players can purchase in-game. Two weeks later, some of these guys are sitting on royalties of up to $47,000 USD.

Not bad for a mackerel wrapped in newsprint.

Valve says that royalty payments exceeded PayPal's maximum deposit size, leading two community content creators to fly to Seattle to pick up checks in person.

Unsurprisingly, Valve says we should expect more regular updates on the community created side in Team Fortress 2. Everybody wins... with money!

Oct 20, 2010

Team Fortress 2 Update Released

Team Fortress 2 - Valve

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

Trading changes
- Added some anti-scam advice to the chat window.
- Increased trading slots to 8 slots per person.
- Added item rarity colors.
- Added the item’s original name to the item description.
- Made most tools tradable.
- Fixed Ellis’ Cap and the Frying Pan not being tradable

Oct 20, 2010

PC Gamer UK Podcast 45: Deja Vu

Team Fortress 2

Tim, Tom, Graham and Craig take a second stab at a podcast that was destroyed in a fire. We weigh in on whether Dota 2 can make Defense of the Ancients fun for the masses, how big a deal Fallout: New Vegas is, the philosophy behind BioShock Infinite, the ability to use feces as a writing implement in Duke Nukem Forever, the wisdom or otherwise of scaling difficulty in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the prospects for Civ 5's AI, and our ever-changing opinions of Team Fortress 2 selling items for real money. Tom also does an impression of the police baton from Deus Ex 1.

This is an extra-long bonus ultra podcast, bonusly ultra-soon after the last one, to make up for our unexpectedly long hiatus. And as a special favour to anyone sick of hearing about them, we barely mention StarCraft 2 or Minecraft. In two week's time, we'll be countering this with a favour to anyone who isn't: a Minecraft special about why the game has taken such a firm hold of so many people.

Download the MP3, subscribe, or find our older podcasts here.

Oct 19, 2010

Team Fortress 2 Update Released

Team Fortress 2 - Valve

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

Fixed another sentry gun exploit that let Engineers build multiple sentries
Fixed Engineers being able to build level 3 mini-sentries using The Wrangler for real this time

Oct 18, 2010

Team Fortress 2 Update Released

Team Fortress 2 - Valve

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

Fixed a sentry gun exploit that let Engineers build multiple sentries
Fixed Engineers being able to build level 3 mini-sentries using The Wrangler
Fixed the Holy Mackerel hit triggering the first blood event in Arena mode
Fixed seeing error particle systems in old demos

Oct 14, 2010

Sandwich and I are coming for you!

Team Fortress 2 - SZ

After days of deliberation, a moderate amount of yelling, and an M&M inexplicably up Drew Wolf's nose again, we're happy to announce the winners of the art pass contest. That's right, winners. Multiple. There were so many good-looking and fun maps that it was incredibly tough to narrow them all down to a single entry. So much so that we didn't bother.

Congratulations to Valentin "3DNJ" Levillain and Timothy "YM" Johnson. <a href="http://tf2maps.net/contests/artpass/winners/">TF2Maps.net</a> has a page up where you can view the winners of the contest, along with many of the other fantastic entries.

<a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=4489&p=1">Read the full blog post here!</a>

Oct 14, 2010

Sandwich and I are coming for you!

Team Fortress 2 - SZ

After days of deliberation, a moderate amount of yelling, and an M&M inexplicably up Drew Wolf's nose again, we're happy to announce the winners of the art pass contest. That's right, winners. Multiple. There were so many good-looking and fun maps that it was incredibly tough to narrow them all down to a single entry. So much so that we didn't bother.

Congratulations to Valentin "3DNJ" Levillain and Timothy "YM" Johnson. http://tf2maps.net/contests/artpass/winners/ has a page up where you can view the winners of the contest, along with many of the other fantastic entries.

Read the full blog post here!

Oct 14, 2010

Sandwich and I are coming for you!

Team Fortress 2

After days of deliberation, a moderate amount of yelling, and an M&M inexplicably up Drew Wolf's nose again, we're happy to announce the winners of the art pass contest. That's right, winners. Multiple. There were so many good-looking and fun maps that it was incredibly tough to narrow them all down to a single entry. So much so that we didn't bother.

Congratulations to Valentin "3DNJ" Levillain and Timothy "YM" Johnson. TF2Maps.net has a page up where you can view the winners of the contest, along with many of the other fantastic entries.

Oct 12, 2010

Team Fortress 2 Update Released

Team Fortress 2 - Valve

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

Fixed server crash caused by a Scout using the Sandman on an enemy Scout who has used Bonk!
Made Ellis' Cap and the Frying Pan tradable
Added "Automatically respawn after loadout changes in respawn zones" option to the Options->Multiplayer->Advanced dialog
Fixed a problem with the Lugermorph model