Valve has paid more than $10 million to Team Fortress 2 contributors

Valve has announced a new landmark for its six-year-old FPS—Team Fortress 2. The company has announced on the Team Fortress 2 blog that it has paid out more than $10 million to more than 400 contributors and partners. Out of that massive figure, $250,000 went to the more than 60 contributors who helped create the recent Robotic Boogaloo update.

The company has a content-generation system in TF2, as well as the still-in-beta Dota 2 where essentially anyone with enough 3D modelling skill can create their own aesthetic items (or even guns, in the case of Team Fortress 2) and make it available in game for a modest sum. Out of this sum, 75 percent goes to Valve and 25 percent goes to the developer. It is due to this that the company has been able to sustain Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2, both of which are free-to-play.

$10 million is a large figure

Valve has also announced that it has retooled its item submission tool, thereby making submitting new items for Team Fortress 2 easier. As the company puts it, "it's never been easier to submit." The new tool automatically tests new creations against a set of standards, making submissions in general more game-ready.

There is also a system in place now where contributors can check out how their items will render on Team Fortress 2's character models from within the tool itself. This makes the testing and optimising process much quicker than it was before. Every item that has been submitted through the new tool will now be tagged with a gold star, which proves that it has been vetted.

The next update for Team Fortress 2 is set to include only items that have been submitted through the new tool and have the gold star on them, and according to Valve, there's no hard limit on how many items will make it into the update.

You can grab Team Fortress 2 from Valve’s digital distribution service Steam.