Team Fortress 2 player numbers have dropped significantly this year, with the average numbers of players barely topping 40,000 and the game itself falling down the list of Steam's most played games from its typical number four spot, to sixth on the list. That's still respectable for such an old game, but why have players been dropping off so much?
Of all of Valve's games, Team Fortress 2 has been its most enduring so far. Sure DotA 2 looks set to have a more popular and longer-lasting legacy, but TF2 has been going strong for over a decade and helped inspire a new era of class-based shooter gameplay. Titles like Overwatch draw heavily from its tongue-in-cheek tone, its cartoonish graphics and its unique characters. But it may be that TF2's influence is waning.
As PCGamesN points out, it once enjoyed an average of around 50,000 players, with peaks of 60+ thousand at times. Most recently though, we've seen numbers fall to as little as 36,000 in March and 40,000 is a rough average that isn't often beaten. So what's going on?
It's certainly possible that new, competitive shooters have drawn players away. Battlegrounds may have done so initially, though the free to play Fortnite seems more likely to have made a bigger impact on the F2P community of TF2. However, another possibility has arisen from the TF2 playerbase: bot smackdowns. It's been suggested for a while that bots were a major component of the game, considering the monetary value of Team Fortress 2 cosmetics.
If Valve has made a crackdown on item farmers or those who idle in private servers to unlock trading cards, it's certainly possible that the numbers would have taken a tumble.
Why do you think TF2 has fallen down the ranks of the most popular games as of late?
