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It's a month since Valve's Team Fortress 2 went free-to-play, and the company is celebrating this minor but welcome achievement with some of the DLC that's now powering the title financially. Of course, this being Valve, it had to be something a bit unexpected... to be precise, a set of steampunk-themed Dr. Grordbort's rayguns, previously only available to wealthy collectors of functionally useless knickknacks and fans of filmmaker Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop, which designed the weapons.

One drawback with purchasing a digital copy of a game is that there's nothing to do with it when you're tired of playing. Valve's new program, Steam Gifts, doesn't solve that problem, but it is a step towards letting players to get rid of unwanted games — which is a step in the right direction. The beta version of the program (which can be activated in your Steam account settings) allows players to barter in-game items and games that have been gifted to them...

A devoted Team Fortress 2 fan, Matt De Lanoy, has unveiled his collection of to-scale LEGO characters inspired by Valve's team-based shooter, Team Fortress 2. Pictures of individual TF2 figures can be found on his Flickr account along with De Lanoy's other creations, including LEGO figures inspired by Arrested Development and Futurama...

Valve's Steam Trading feature has gone live, graduating from a four-week beta in which over 1,000,000 exchanges took advantage of the system. The feature adds an Item Inventory to your Steam Community profile, allowing Steam Gifts and items within compatible games to be traded with other users. So far, only three titles support the new feature, but the platform's most item-rich game is already on the list...

If you thought the official Skyrim trailers looked good, you were right. But what's also good are fan-made Skyrim trailers, and even better are fan-made Skyrim trailers built in Team Fortress 2. As a special project that only took a couple of months and half-a-dozen hardworking actors, Armago24X (and his friends) put together an homage to Bethesda's upcoming Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. Check it… 

Team Fortress 2 has changed a lot over the past few years. When it was first released every character looked the same and it cost actual money to play. How crazy is that? Now TF2 is free-to-play, and characters carry unique weapons and items that set them apart from the other players on the battlefield.

But even more important than the gun in your hands… is the hat on your head. As of today, there’s one more hat available in the game, and it’s available to anyone who purchases PC Gamer Digital Episode 1. All you need to do is download the first episode on Steam and you’ll be rewarded with The Killer Exclusive hat, which might be the mightiest hat of them all...

The Halloween spirit is alive and well (or dead and sickly - take your pick) over at Team Fortress 2. Valve has unleashed its Third Annual Scream Fortress Very Scary Halloween Special, treating players to a twisted version of the Viaduct map, and an up close and personal encounter with the terror-inducing Monoculus (cue: organ, thunder, screams, etc.)...

If there's a game that Minecraft's Markus “Notch” Persson likes more than his own, it's Team Fortress 2. He often talks on Twitter about his love for the game, and, apparently, Valve has been listening. In a beautiful showing of respect, the developers have gifted Notch a one-of-a-kind hat for Team Fortress 2, and put it atop a blocky recreation of his head. Eerie? Definitely. Wonderful? Absolutely...

As the PC section at your local games store continues to shrink, digital distribution services like Steam continue to prosper. Today, Valve announced that Steam enjoyed its seventh year of over 100% growth in sales. Is anyone even bothering to buy boxed copies of PC titles anymore...