Andy Warhol once said, "In the future, anybody who wants fifteen minutes of fame has to fight me for it." Brave words from a man who was pummeled to death seconds later by Matt Damon. Luckily, with fame-bully Warhol out of the way, people can now be famous for as long as they want. We decided to start small with a 15-second commercial starring the TF2 mercs, which will appear this Sunday at midnight during the Venture Bros. premiere on Adult Swim.
When we first launched the Workshop back in 2011, we had no idea what the TF2 community was capable of. As the hats, beards, boots and hairdos started rolling in, we realized there was a huge well of creativity out there. But we didn’t appreciate just how deep those waters ran until the community-made updates started appearing. Now we've finally gotten to the point where we're able to shine a well-deserved spotlight on your efforts, starting with the Robotic Boogaloo Update, which includes 57 new items—the most community items we've ever shipped at once. Currently the items are only available in RoboCrates. RoboCrates will become rare drops after June 3rd.
This update is 100% created by the TF2 community. And when we say everything, we mean everything—the in-game content, the update hub website, the animated short, the comic, even the splash images in the Steam store. Even better, everything you created avoided the classic trap of using other companies’ intellectual property. (Those of you working on a Darth Vader Pyro mask, we've got some bad news for you.) Plus, in a first for the Team Fortress economy, all the creators of the Robotic Boogaloo Update have decided to share the revenue earned from the sale of RoboCrate Keys. That means that everyone involved will be profiting from this update, not just the people making hats.
This doesn't mark the end of Valve-produced TF2 updates, by the way. As far as we’re concerned, there's plenty of room for both to happily co-exist. We're in uncharted territory here, and it's exciting to be exploring it with you. Amazing work, everyone!
Hey, folks. The next time you launch TF2, Steam is going to perform a one-time conversion process to upgrade to SteamPipe, a new content delivery system that improves the way content is downloaded, updated and stored. (If you've already upgraded, don't worry, it's done.)
The conversion process will only happen once, and then things are gonna get a lot better. But be patient: The conversion probably will take some time. Even on a machine with a fast hard drive, it could take up to 20-30 minutes, during which time it might look like it's hung. But it's not. Don't interrupt it, just please be patient and let it think.
We're sorry to any of you who are getting subjected to a longer-than-expected conversion time. But ultimately, the benefits will be worth a little inconvenience. You'll get faster uninterrupted downloads, quicker boot times and map loads, and easier distribution, installation and management of mods. Read the FAQ for more info, and thanks again for your patience.