Team Fortress 2 will now be supported entirely by its in-game store.

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Alongside the announcement of the Uber Update earlier this week, Valve announced that Team Fortress 2 would be free to play for the next week. Unlike when the game has been temporarily made free in the past, the ability to buy the game was removed from its Steam page. This led to speculation that it might be going to free to play for good; Steam recently began offering F2P titles, so it seemed possible. Sure enough, Robin Walker has revealed in a Develop interview that Team Fortress 2 is now free to play -- permanently. The game added an in-game store last September to sell items (weapons and aesthetic-only hats) made by Valve and users. Allowing everyone to freely play the game increases the number of potential customers the store can see, so it's not as if this move is simply giving up money.
"We've been toying with the idea ever since the Mann-conomy update, where we added the in-game Team Fortress 2 store," Walker said. "Over the years we've done a bunch of price experimentations with the game, going all the way down to $2.49 in our random one-hour Halloween sales. The more we've experimented, the more we've learned there are fundamentally different kinds of customers, each with their own way of valuing the product. Now that we're shipping it, it feels like a fairly straightforward next step along the 'Games as Services' path we've been walking down for a while now."
The store alone will be what supports the game; Valve won't be adding a subscription option or any advertisements to bring in additional revenue. Random item drops -- a way to get almost any item from the store without paying a dime -- won't be affected, which is one subtle change cynics might expect to be made.
As someone who still frequently plays TF2 and enjoys the updates and availability of items on the store, I'm excited to see an influx of new players. The amount of support Valve has given the game since its launch in 2007 is incredible, and this hopefully means the free DLC won't be stopping anytime soon.

Ref: http://www.1up.com

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Last Thursday on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon was supposed to be a time of jubilee for DICE, the makers of Battlefield 3, and gamers alike. But what first was an awesome show, turned into a controversy between console and PC fans, with certain PS3 owners expressing disappointment with the quality of the PS3 footage shown on the show. Even Xbox 360 was brought in the mix and DICE has rarely said anything concerning said platform.
DICE’s Rendering Architect Johan Andersson has had enough. He’s about to stop talking about the game in full on twitter, but before he leaves, one last message must be relayed.
“To reaffirm, we are optimizing #bf3 for _all_ platforms to take advantage of their resp. strengths & create an awesome shooter experience,” he said on twitter.
Andersson was really put off by an article from Examiner titled: “DICE Favoring Xbox on Consoles After Cursing Out PS3 Fans”. In fact, Andersson was so displeased with the thread, he expressed it through a tweet: Omg, he didn’t even post the tweet I was replying to. sigh.”
To close, the developer said he’ll be taking a hiatus from talking Battlefield 3 on twitter, adding: “I love talking directly to gamers, but too many troll journalists out there so think I’ll have to shut up about #bf3 details for now, bye.”
Hopefully this puts an end to the controversy.
Video Thirst: The Battlefield 3 PS3 Footage At Center Of Controversy
http://youtu.be/DydjymAAfno
The shooter comes out worldwide on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 October 25th.

Ref: http://www.gamesthirst.com/

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Battlefield 3 will feature 4 man squads like in Bad Company 2, however, according to DICE’s Alan Kertz, who once again confirmed some new info via Twitter, squad spawning has changed compared to Bad Company 2. In Battlefield 3, the squad members can only spawn on the squad leader, while the squad leader can spawn on any squad member. This seems to be the right way to do it, as Kertz points out: “it keeps pace up without tons of spawns”. One of the (minor) problems in Bad Company 2 was that any squad member could spawn on any squad member, meaning, for instance, one player camping behind enemy lines could spawn 3 additional squad mates.
The new system resembles a lot like Battlefield 2, where squad mates could only spawn on the squad leader, while the squad leader had to spawn at the spawn point. on the flip side, this led to a lot of “squad hopping”, whereby a player who died would hop to a squad with a leader closest to the action, and spawn on him. Squad hopping was later fixed in a patch.

Ref: http://bf3blog.com/

New map on its way form Blixxx