Team Fortress 2: Robotic Boogaloo is a new update hitting the popular free-to-play shooter with content that was made entirely by fans for fans.

Here’s the official word from Valve:

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.

Those concerned about Valve stepping back from Team Fortress 2 development need not worry. Valve says that its own content will co-exist with fan-developed content from here on out.

Naughty Dog announced that Uncharted 3 will be broken up into parts and sold separately from each other on the PSN starting today. That means players will be able to play the multiplayer experience separately from the singleplayer experience, or they can buy it all in one big pack. The big change, of course, is that multiplayer is going free to play with some freemium elements thrown in for good measure.

So, how is this gonna work? Naughty Dog says that everybody can play multiplayer for free, no strings attached, up until level 15. After that, the game will continue to keep track of your experience points if you wish to upgrade to the next level cap. According to Joystiq, upgrading to level 25 will cost $5 and removing the level cap entirely will cost $20.

Here’s all the extra add-ons players can buy to augment the free-to-play experience:

Those who already purchased Uncharted 3 will be given a special Naughty Dog Paw on their rank icon as well as a special Naughty Dog Paw shirt for their in-game character.

Naughty Dog also promises that more than 40 additional DLC items will be added to the game in the coming months. Here’s hoping one of them is a Donut Drake skin that’s easier to unlock.

Sony says its next console will accomodate all business models, including free to play, so it’s better to start experimenting in the field now. Uncharted 3 should prove to be an excellent test field to see how well a free to play game performs on consoles.

Dirty Bomb may remind gamers quite a bit of Brink, for better or worse. The new game will feature a similar class system, where players can choose to take on the role of the engineer, medic, soldier, field ops, or sniper. Teams will then work together to accomplish “military objectives.” The game will take place in a near-future London, a setting no-doubt inspired by the U.K.’s recently announced tax relief for British developers that make games featuring and promoting the U.K.

Though the game is still in a pre-alpha state, Splash Damage is already offering tiered pricing on the title. For $30, $60, or $120, gamers can get priority beta access and some game-related merchandise. The game will be free when it launches, however, so gamers can still sign up on the Dirty Bomb website to reserve a name and have a “chance” to be part of the beta.

Subscriptions for the modern day, Lovecraftian, conspiracy theory-laden MMO are now optional. Players can buy the game for $30 (or €30 or £25) and play all of the story content currently available. Four major updates for the title, which was released back in July, have already been released. Funcom is offering all of the upcoming content in the fifth update and an “Initiate Pack” (which includes weapons, a pet, and social clothing) for players who buy the game before December 31. Starting in January, updates (called “Issues” in Secret World parlance) will be sold for $5 each.

Like nearly all MMOs that have switched to free-to-play, The Secret World still has perks for players who continue to subscribe. Subscribers gain access to a monthly allotment of $10 worth of in-game cash, a monthly item-of-the-month, a 10% discount on all in-game store items, and a Time Accelerator – an item that doubles experience gain for 1 hour, with a 16 hour cool-down. In addition, those who have purchased the Grandmaster Pack get an extra 10% off in-game store items on top of the subscription discount.

The game will be set in the Kingdom of Opulencia, where everyone seems to have a castle and a hoard of treasure. Gamers will be tasked with looting their neighbors’ castles while fortifying their own against attack. The game’s website claims that there are more than 500 individual pieces of loot to collect. Player characters can be improved as they quest through enemy castles and gain loot.

Castles can be generated by the player community. Gamers can create a layout for their castle, then fill it with lots of monsters to kill off intruders. Top it off with traps around every corner, and players can begin earning rewards for killing off other players who venture into their castle.

The trailer for the game, seen below, is very tongue-in-cheek, and hopefully shows the atmosphere Ubisoft is trying to create for the game. It will be interesting to see if Ubisoft Montreal can manage to successfully combine these two different genres and build a community around The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot. If nothing else, the developer deserves credit for an interesting idea.

Amazon announced today the launch of Game Connect, a new service that will see many of the more popular free-to-play and MMOs delivered digitally to players through Amazon’s digital games portal. It’s more than just delivery though as integration into Game Connect will allow players to buy in-game items through Amazon which makes microtransactions easier for both developers and players.

So how does this all work? Customers can now link their in-game accounts to their Amazon account for easy delivery of those crazy costumes or power-ups they want to get in their favorite free-to-play games. During the checkout process, players will see similar items from the same game or other games to increase visibility across the platform. All in all, it’s a great way to extend brand awareness across the network.

“Customers can now discover a new category of free-to-play games and can experience the convenience of having virtual items purchased with their Amazon account delivered directly to their game accounts,” says Mike Frazzini, director, Amazon Games. “Game Connect helps game developers reach more customers, move more quickly and grow their business by simplifying the purchase process for customers. This is an exciting next step for the Digital Games Store and we have even more to come.”

Game Connect is starting off with a pretty big collection of games that will appeal to players of different types. You’ve got more action oriented affair like World of Tanks and Super Monday Night Combat to more traditional free-to-play role-playing games like Shin Megami Tensei Imagine and Runescape.

If you play any of these games, take note: Linking your account with Amazon Game Connect will net you exclusive in-game items that are normally valued at around $15 or more. It’s a great way for Amazon to get their foot in the door with these games and you get free stuff. It’s a win-win for everybody. Check out Amazon’s Game Connect exclusive offers at their store front.

Game Connect is obviously Amazon firing a shot across the bow of Steam. Many companies have risen with services trying to take down Steam and all have met with minimal success. Amazon stands to make the biggest dent in Steam’s market share and Game Connect is one more tool for them to reach that goal. It will be really interesting to watch this play out over the next few months to see if Steam allows free-to-play games on their service to connect with Game Connect.

“We are very excited about our relationship with Tencent and the opportunities for gaming in China,” said Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision. “We think China is one of the most exciting places in the world for us to grow our business and to develop innovative new games.”

Activision stated that Call of Duty Online has been in development for around two years. The agreement between Activision and Tencent means that Tencent will have exclusive rights to operate the game in mainland China.

“We believe Call of Duty Online will attract tens of millions of loyal fans in China, and our game platform and operational expertise to run massive multi-player online games can provide strong support to deliver the immersive and highly interactive game experience to game players in China,” said Martin Lau, president of Tencent.

Releasing a free to play, online game might just be the only strategy that could work for Activision in China, where piracy of video games is rampant. The companies hope to make money through the sale of in-game items and upgrades. Activision said that players will be able to use the in-game store to enhance their weapons, gear, and perks in ways specifically designed for Chinese gamers. The game will also feature a series of “Special Operations” missions that tell an original story based in the Modern Warfare universe.

Take a look below at the announcement trailer for Call of Duty Online:

In a recent interview with GamesTM, The Old Republic’s lead designer, Emmanuel Lusinchi, discussed the challenges of running a subscription-based MMO when there are so many good free-to-play MMOs vying for attention. He acknowledged that their biggest competitor in the market isn’t WoW, but rather the free-to-play genre.

So does that mean The Old Republic is going free-to-play anytime soon? When asked of the possibility, Lusinchi only said, “The MMO market is very dynamic and we need to be dynamic as well.” He then goes on to directly say that they’re looking at free-to-play, but nothing is set in stone.

If you’ve been following the MMO market over the last few years, you would see that the trend is now free-to-play. Even when a subscription-based MMO comes out, it quickly moves to free-to-play as users can’t justify spending a monthly fee. One of the major examples of the last year was DC Universe Online which went free-to-play within six months of its launch.

So would it be a good move for The Old Republic to go free-to-play? Well, we need to look at a number of factors. Going free-to-play is usually a sign of failure and EA obviously doesn’t want that. At it’s E3 press conference, the publisher was touting its subscription numbers and the amount of work BioWare putting into the game. On the other hand, going free-to-play can increase revenue exponentially since more people are playing the game while buying lots of add-ons via micro-transactions.

It’s a complicated issue. The best compromise would be to offer some form of free-to-play to everybody, while giving subscribers special perks. It would get more people playing the game, while retaining the current subscriber base. It’s a win-win for everybody.

According to the original post, Facebook says that paid apps is just another way to support more types of apps. If you’ve been through the current crop of Facebook apps, they all support themselves through in-app purchases. It’s been a wildly successful business model that has helped jumpstart the growth of giants like Zynga. The question now is whether or not paid apps on Facebook have the potential to revolutionize social app growth that in-app purchases also had.

We first went straight to the source to ask what brought about the new option in app delivery. Facebook told WebProNews pretty much the same thing that the original post told us. They said that it’s “another option for developers who are interested in growing their business in that way.” This now makes the question whether or not paid apps could do as well as free apps that are supported by in-app purchases.

For the purpose of this article, let’s keep the focus strictly on games. Facebook games are the apps that push in-app purchases the most and are the most likely to go paid once Facebook starts offering the option with the App Center. If you look at the top ten free apps on both iTunes and Google Play, the majority of them are regular apps like Instagram, Facebook and Google Maps with some dinky games thrown in. The paid apps paint a picture of higher quality apps with games leading the quality charge.

Now, what’s to stop developers from going the paid app route with their games once they hit the App Center? Sure, there might be more money coming from in-app purchases, but what happens when games start to become more sophisticated? Even though more and more people are accessing Facebook via mobile devices, there are still a lot of users using Facebook on desktops to play games. Create games that leverage the power of the desktop using either Flash or HTML5. If there’s one thing that people like more than simple, mind-numbing entertainment, it’s graphics. Create a beautiful Web-powered game for Facebook and people will flock to it.

If this proves to be popular among Facebook players, developers can start introducing more traditional models of monetization. Imagine a paid app that goes for $4.99, but then supplements the experience with DLC that can be paid for as in-app purchases. Create an RPG and add new areas to the game at a later date for a small fee. It has the potential to bring traditional games to Facebook and increase the audience for Facebook games.

I’m not going to argue against free – free is good. I would like to think, however, that people understand the value of the work that goes into a game. That’s why the majority of the top ten paid apps on both major mobile platforms are games. They’re not only good games, but they also push represent the best of what you can do with the platform. Now imagine that on Facebook, but with something on the level of say Skyrim where players can become totally immersed in rich single-player fiction while keeping the social spirit of games alive.

While I may lament the downsizing of traditional retail gaming markets in favor of social and mobile games, I think Facebook now has the power to really shake things up. With the addition of paid apps, it might encourage more developers to bring sophisticated experiences to the platform. I like to think that a paid app instills confidence in a user that the game they are about to experience is of higher quality than the free-to-play games that make their money through in-app purchases.

The final piece of this puzzle all comes down to Facebook though. Currently, they take a 30 percent cut of all in-app purchases through the use of Facebook credits. The company never clarified if paid apps purchased through the App Center will also require Facebook Credits, but I’m willing to guess that they will. Now, will Facebook still take that much of a cut or will they lower the cut they take, at least initially, to draw interest?

The fact of the matter is that nobody knows anything yet. The App Center is still weeks away and we don’t know when Facebook will even start offering paid apps. Facebook said that developers can sign up for a beta, but the sign-up page just asks for a description and a picture of the app’s home page. It tells us nothing in regards to when paid apps will be available. It’s safe to assume that App Center will service only free-to-play at its launch which means paid apps will have quite the hill to climb.

Regardless, paid apps can always compete with free if the value is apparent. People are willing to pay for something if they feel that the product is worth it. I think that Facebook gaming, and Facebook apps in general, are about to get far more exciting when paid apps are introduced. Beyond just the reputation of an app, quality will be considered when it comes to what is paid and what is not. It could also lead to trial apps which then lead to more features being unlocked once the user goes paid. Offering both free-to-play and paid apps drives up the quality across the board.

Facebook just has to cultivate this quality before they are overcome by the likes of Google+ games or any platform that may rise up to take on the veritable master of social gaming in the near future.

Do you think paid apps on Facebook are going to have a major effect on the app economy? Will game and other apps’ quality start to increase once they have to compete with paid apps? Let us know in the comments.

After a South Korean newspaper, translated by Bloomberg, shared the news that a takeover was likely, everybody started to question whether or not Nexon could buy EA. It’s not out of the realm of possibility, but it was very unlikely all the same. It turns out the discussions were not about a takeover, but rather a soccer game.

EA Sports publishes the FIFA Soccer games domestically and abroad. The fútbol simulator is much more popular in European and Asian countries than it is in the United States though. For that reason, EA decided to release an online version of the title called FIFA Online. It hasn’t done super well in most countries, but it does good business at least in one area – Asia.

Who has the established market and knowhow to publish and sell a game in Asia, specifically South Korea, China and Japan? Nexon does. Who doesn’t have all these things? EA, of course. So those talks from last week, according to Bloomberg, were actually all about EA talking to Nexon about distributing FIFA Online 2 in Korea and other Asian countries. EA specifically wants to take advantage of Nexon’s ability to coerce players into buying digital items.

Bloomberg reports that EA currently distributes its games in South Korea through Neowiz Games Corp., but the deal isn’t exclusive. This could leave EA open to pursue future deals with Nexon for its online games like more versions of FIFA Online and whatever else they decide to turn into an online franchise. My suggestion? Syndicate Online, but players have to learn how to really hack to stand a chance in the battles.

It’s good to see that EA and Nexon aren’t in talks for a merger, at least for now. I would hate to see what would happen if the king of retail and the king of free-to-play joined forces. It would probably gobble up the entirety of the games industry and leave nothing left.

What do you think of EA hoping to offload its online games to Nexon? Would you have preferred to see a merger? Let us know in the comments