The Valve News Network, a one-man operation that correctly reported on Half-Life: Alyx throughout its secret development process, is now pulling the curtain back on another Valve favorite. While Team Fortress 2 updates have slowed to a crawl in recent years, there have been Valve employees working on the game since launch all the way back in 2007. With the development of Valve’s flagship VR game coming to a head, that has recently changed. Now, outside of community-led drops of cosmetics and maps, it appears that Team Fortress 2 development has hit its natural end of life.
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However, as stated in the video, Valve is not a company that will reveal that to their player base. Because they want to ensure that the door is always open to any future updates they want to make, Valve will let the existing Team Fortress community “sit in eternal anticipation” for more official content. In recent updates, one Valve employee even admits that players know Team Fortress 2 better than Valve at this point, and that their updates are often on par with anything Valve can cook up.
There were some updates in the pipeline, including a space-themed update, a retro/anniversary update, and an introduction of female mercenaries, but they’ve all been put “on hold” due to Half-Life VR development and a tepid reception to 2017’s Jungle Inferno update. Typically, when something at Valve is put “on hold,” it means it won’t get picked up again.
The video also explains that Team Fortress 2 typically only has around ten thousand players at any given time. This stands in contrast to the player count reported on sites like SteamCharts, which usually hovers around fifty thousand. That number does reflect the number of active users, but many of them are idling in-game trying to make money from Team Fortress‘ still thriving hat market. So, while the Team Fortress community continues to create their own fun, it seems that Valve is pretty much finished with the Gravel Wars for now.
