“Hardly anyone” is working on Team Fortress 2

After over a decade, it looks like TF2 support is drying up

There’s “hardly anyone” working on Team Fortress 2, and that’s “kind of obvious,” according to long-time Valve employee Greg Coomer. It’s been ages since the venerable shooter has seen any major updates, and the devs don’t seem to have any big plans for the future – but there are no current plans to pull the plug entirely.

“There are very few people working on Team Fortress,” Coomer tells Valve News Network. “I don’t know the exact number, but it’s you know hardly anyone anymore. I think that’s kind of obvious, because we don’t have big updates for that game really anymore. We’re just kind of keeping it going, and we’re just gonna try and not shut it down or anything. But there’s hardly anyone working on it.”

While Team Fortress 2 player count appears to remain healthy – it even hit a new record last year – as VNN notes, that number is heavily inflated by bots idling for marketable goods. The real player count tends to settle in the four-digit range, which is enough to easily find matches, but not necessarily enough to justify continued development.

Still, community involvement has helped keep TF2 alive, according to Coomer. “I think it’s awesome that the community has tried to pick up the slack, because a lot of times their work is better than ours, and they should know that. They probably do know that. It’s not the case that, just because people work here, they’re making better than any of that content. Sometimes we do a better job, but a lot of the time the community knows Team Fortress well enough to make stuff that’s even better than we could.”

You can get a lengthier breakdown on the state of TF2 in the video above.

There are other big recent and upcoming Valve announcements – ranging from CS:GO’s Operation Shattered Web and Remote Play Together to Half-Life: Alyx, but it looks like the venerable, team-based FPS game will not be among them. TF2 launched all the way back in 2007, so even if updates have dried up, it’s been an incredible run.