Team Fortress 2 Update: Valve’s Shooter Isn’t As Dead As You Thought

Hey, remember Team Fortress 2? It was the hat-collecting game with a pretty decent PVP first-person shooter bolted onto it, which gave the Internet maybe half its memes between 2007 and 2020. You might even be one of the 100,000 people or so who are in-game on Steam playing TF2 at any given time. Now, there’s a new update on the game from the Team Fortress 2 blog.

When Was Team Fortress 2 Last Updated?

In recent years, actual development work on TF2 had seemingly slowed to a crawl, with few updates from publisher/developer Valve Software and little new content. The last major content patch for TF2 from Valve appears to be 2018’s Halloween-themed “Scream Fortress X” update. It was widely assumed that the passing of Rick May, the voice of the Soldier, served as an unofficial coda for Team Fortress 2, which seemed to be in an unannounced maintenance mode as of July 2020.

There was still a lot going on in TF2’s Steam Workshop, but Valve itself wasn’t doing much, even when an epidemic of bots broke out on TF2’s public servers in 2021.

Team Fortress 2 Blog Update 2023

Now, a full 2 1/2 years after its last public update on TeamFortress.com, Valve has broken its silence. In a new blog post, the TF2 Team has put out an all-call for creators on the Steam Workshop, in order to support the first full-sized summer event for Team Fortress 2 in several years.

The TF2 team writes:

The last few Team Fortress summer events have only been item updates. But this year, we’re planning on shipping a full-on holiday-sized update — with items, maps, taunts, unusual effects, war paints, and other community-contributed fixes for the game!

The TF2 event for summer 2023 is conspicuously “as-yet-unnamed, un-themed, but still very exciting.” Past summer events for TF2 have included the official release of several fan-created items that Valve selected from the Workshop; balance tweaks to existing items and weapons; and new maps, such as Process and Standin.

Interested Steam Workshop item craftspeople are encouraged to submit their entries for the upcoming, unnamed TF2 event by May 1st. Stay tuned for another Team Fortress 2 update in the future, where we’ll learn more.