Team Fortress 2 Source: "There Is Nothing Being Worked On Right Now"

Good old Team Fortress 2 -- and I do mean "old," since it launched in 2007 -- is still chugging along, maintaining its position as one of the top games on Steam. But that's not accurate, says one YouTuber, who claims that active development on the game has all but ceased, at least for the time being.

Valve News Network lays out the grim story, and his source is longtime Valve employee Greg Coomer, who said that "There are very few people working on Team Fortress." Coomer said it's "kind of obvious," given the game's lack of big updates -- the last one appears to have been over two years ago -- and that it's "awesome that the community is trying to pick up the slack because a lot of the time their work has been better than ours."

While VNN's sources don't go as far as to say that TF2 is "dead," they acknowledge that there's nothing going on right now because of how other projects have a higher priority -- notably VR title Half-Life: Alyx, scheduled for a March 2020 launch.

Still, for a game that's essentially in maintenance mode, it's not doing too badly, to see the numbers reported by Steam. According to those, TF2 has about 50,000 players online all the time, but VNN counters that assessment by saying that those numbers are "heavily inflated by people that are idling in game in order to just try and make money." He claims that the the actual number of legitimate players in the game at the time of recording was around 6,000.

The site he references, however, teamwork.tf, countered that claim with the help of someone on Reddit and their handy chart. In brief, the counterclaim acknowledges that their are idle players in TF2, but they don't make up close to 90% of the reported players.

Whichever side is correct, it's clear that Team Fortress 2 hasn't gotten nearly the attention it used to from Valve, and even a big update, like 2017's Jungle Inferno, didn't do much to move the needle for the decade-old game. That's part of why VNN thinks active development has been dialed back, but as long as the lights stay on, it's possible that another update might still arrive.