Team Fortress 2 has been among the top 10 most-played games on Steam since it was released in 2007
(Picture: Valve)After 944 days without an update, Valve’s official Team Fortress blog has broken a silence that dates back to July 2020 — and it’s promising the first serious update for the game in six years.
In a tongue-in-cheek entry that explains the need to bypass TikTok and Twitter for a blog post (“the most bleeding-edge communication technology available”), Valve outlined the kind of thing to expect.
“The last few Team Fortress summer events have only been item updates,” the company wrote. “But this year, we’re planning on shipping a full-on, update-sized update — with items, maps, taunts, unusual effects, war paints and who knows what else?!”
That may sound rhetorical, but it is literally true for the TF2 team as well, as they’re asking the community to contribute Steam Workshop content for possible inclusion. Anybody interested in making something for consideration has until May 1 to submit it.
It’s fair to say that Team Fortress 2, despite its enduring popularity, hasn’t received much love from Valve in recent years. Indeed, it was so neglected that the community had to get the hashtag #SaveTF2 trending on Twitter for the company to finally respond to the so-called bot crisis. This was a two-year-old problem, where the majority of matches were unplayable thanks to an epidemic of superhuman AI players.
This would seem unthinkable given that Team Fortress 2 has consistently sat in the top 10 most-played games on Steam since release in 2007. So how has such a popular title been so neglected?
One possible reason for this is the unique way Valve — the company behind Half-Life, Steam and the Steam Deck — is structured. As revealed in the freely available company handbook, employees are allowed to work on whatever projects interest them, literally wheeling their workstations to join whatever internal project they fancy.
“We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects,” the handbook says. “At Valve, that percentage is 100.
“Since Valve is flat, people don’t join projects because they’re told to. Instead, you’ll decide what to work on after asking yourself the right questions,” the handbook explains, stating that employees vote with their feet “or desk wheels”.
As such, there’s possibly a tendency to work on the new and exciting at the expense of keeping older games — such as the 16-year-old Team Fortress 2 — ticking over.
So even if Valve is leaning on the community for this particular update, Team Fortress 2 fans can celebrate a little. It seems someone has wheeled their desk over to work on the game once again.
