Team Fortress 2 Workshop creators have collectively earned a staggering $10m

Remember Team Fortress 2's Robotic Boogaloo ? You have a terrible memory - it was less than a month ago. Well, it was a pretty memorable update nonetheless, comprising 57 entirely new items created by the community, accessible from locked RoboCrates. Now, Valve bring word that the pack has raised nearly $250,000 for the sixty-odd creators responsible - but that's just a fraction of the overall amount. The TF2 Workshop's 400-plus contributors and 'partners' have collectively raised over $10 million since the thing opened in 2011, which I'm told by my robot butler is a lot of money.

You've probably just quit your job after reading that last sentence, so you'll be pleased to hear that Valve have done some work to make the submission process easier. As that blog post explains, "the tool now automatically tests new creations against a set of standards, meaning anything you create is now significantly more likely to be game-ready." Pass these tests, and you'll even get a gold star for your trouble. Valve's next TF2 content update will consist entirely of gold star items, by the way, and there will be "no limit on how many we'll include".

Thanks, PCGamesN .

In related news, a recent TF2 update allowed players to trade the extremely rare Unusual hats. As you might imagine, they're going for silly money .

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.