Team Fortress 2 Strategy

The TF2 Blog has revealed Valve’s latest community portal, a Team Fortress 2 Contribution page, where the more artful among us can submit their custom creations for official inspection. These include custom items (such as hats and weapons) as well as official avatars, and both have a set of guidelines to assist the aspirational.

This, of course, is one big step up from simply taking suggestions from the Steam forums – there are so many talented individuals out there that would kill to be recognised with an official, personalised item of their own creation, and giving them such an open point of submission should do wonders for the amount of official content Valve releases in the future.

My prediction? Next it will be maps, then updates, and eventually Valve will just be stamping approvals on every community modification while the money flows in. Could this just be the first step of outsourcing game development to the gamers themselves? Maybe this is what Gabe was really talking about when he was suggesting gamers could fund development…