According to new reports, Valve is not planning any substantial further development of the shooter “Team Fortress 2” anymore. At least not at the moment. The development is on hold, and no new updates are planned. The shooter can still be found in the Top 10 of the most played games on Steam – but that might be misleading, an insider says.
Where do these information come from? The YouTube channel “Valve News Network” is run by Tyler McVicker. He specializes in news about Valve and their games.
He cites several employees from Valve who have commented on Team Fortress 2.
Other projects are currently more important for Valve
The employees say: According to the statements in the YouTube video:
- hardly anyone is currently working actively on Team Fortress 2
- many Valve developers are currently working on the new VR game Half-Life: Alyx – which is going into the final phase and taking developers away from across the studio
- the work on Team Fortress 2 is on ice
- Valve currently has “more important projects in the works”
- though Valve would never announce the end of a development, because it is still possible that they could allocate resources to Team Fortress 2 again and eventually release an update
Team Fortress 2 supposedly has far fewer active players than assumed
Here is the problem with the player numbers: According to Steamcharts, Team Fortress 2 is still very popular. The title had a peak of 69,869 players in the last 30 days. Even now, it is still in 8th place and thus in the Top 10.
Thus, it is ahead of titles like Rust, which are considered Steam hits and ahead of any active MMORPG on Steam.
However, McVicker says in the video: This number is misleading. In reality, there are significantly fewer active players. He speaks of fewer than 10,000.
Many people would only be hanging around in Team Fortress 2 AFK because the item systems via the Steam marketplace allow for earning money in these games. Team Fortress 2 allows such players to make a lot of money.
However, if a new rule comes that prevents this, – like in CS:GO – the player numbers would collapse.
Unlike Dota 2 and CS:GO, the other games from Valve, Team Fortress 2 is falling behind. The hope now is that the community creates content for the shooter.
