Valve and Online Communities

I have always been a real big fan of Valve and after listening to a recent interview with one of the founders, Gabe Newell, he bought up a few interesting points. He mentioned that he hopes for the future of his games to be very community based, so that we as players end up designing and pushing the game forward, and to it's limits, but even better we get paid for it. Valve have often said that Team Fortress 2 is their "test game", so any new ideas of features they come up with get put into TF2 first, than they can study users reactions. This was recently done with replay editor, which i imagine will be in most of Valves future games.
To make money in TF2, real money not virtual currency, there is a multitude of way, be designing levels, where a user will donate to you. Creating hats, and more recently and more than likely more prominently in the future by creating TF2 movies. The community is very important to a video game, especially a multi player game and using them to the producers advantage is a brilliant idea, and gives the user i real feeling of power, and perhaps even responsibility to make the game what you want.
Now to piss off all the Call of Duty fan boys, recently announced is Call of Duty Elite an online service that lets you compete with your friends and win prizes. More than likely this will help you unlock credits in the next CoD in the series, or perhaps guns and weapons. The major downside to this is the pay monthly feature, having to pay monthly on the off chance you can unlock a new gun. (Yes it's still early days and it may be worth it, but I'm trying to prove a point!) To be part of a community it must be easily accessible, if one side has the advantage than this can't be a good idea, especially if people can't afford to be part of the "VIP" CoD players. This is still in control of Activision, so no community weapons or maps. Not all games need to be fully customisable, but when a game is in control of the fans your more than likely going to get an overall more fun experience.
This may of seemed as if i was bashing Call of Duty there, don't worry I'm sure all the players who play it love it to bits, but for me it's not my thing. And i know the saying 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' applies, but do they really need a "new" multi player every year? And having to pay huge amounts for 3 maps... I'm looking at you also Halo!