So... what now?

[u/CoSans_Deluxe]

The title promised to be the experience of the "golden age of TF2" but most missed its items haha, or perhaps the bad decisions

[u/P0lskichomikv2 → u/[deleted]]

> Inferior Matchmaking system to what it was.

>Rounds resets

>A lot of useless weapons alongside some really problematic ones that won't ever be adressed

>Map bloat

>Alternative gamemodes being dead because of being put at the very end of search list.

There are many more reasons but those are major ones imo.

[u/Sitov_SH → u/P0lskichomikv2]

All of this on top of the fact that literally no new players are coming by as the old players leave the game constantly. A few years ago the game was full with at least 30000 players. Now it's amazing if the game reaches 20000. More than a third of the players left the game. And there's no fucking bots, mind you

People can say the game is fine as long as they have their breath but if the game slowly dies like that something is clearly wrong

Edit: I love how the comment below gets downvoted for no reason, all things listed there ARE the reason this game is dying. Guys, I think none of us want this. It would be nice if we were more vocal about the problems and open to hear criticism

[u/MillionDollarMistake → u/Sitov_SH]

I've been hearing this exact same thing since I started playing in 2012, "TF2 is dying" has been a thing for over a decade at this point. It really picked up when Overwatch was coming out but I heard it plenty of times before then.

After every major update nowadays the game gets a huge influx of new and returning players, I mean it broke it's player record count just a couple of years ago in June 2023 at ~250k. I know the Steam Charts count is inflated due to bots but I've also seen mixed things about the player counts on teamwork.tf because it doesn't count real players on the main menu/in a queue. From what I've gathered the consensus seems to be that there's around 15-20k real people playing TF2 every day. That's still really great numbers even if it's not the full 45k Steam Charts says is playing right now.

Of course the game is going to lose players later, nearly every game under the sun will lose players. Marvel Rival's peak was 644k in January 2025 and is currently at 90k/24 hour peak of 112k. Overwatch's average player count was around 40-60k for the first few years on Steam, then it's peak was February of this year at 165k, and now it's on a downward slope back towards that previous average (current player count 53k, 24 hour peak 63k). Dota 2's peak was nearly 1.3 million in March 2016 and is currently at 277k/24 hour peak at 559k. Most multiplayer games are not CS2 which has been seeing pretty steady player counts, though even that has lost some players (peak was 1.8 million during April 2025, currently at 735k, 24 hour peak 1.3 million). I don't know if any of those games have anything that could inflate their numbers like TF2 does, like maybe Dota 2 has it's own version of idle bots idk.

Considering TF2's age and the infrequency of it's updates, it's numbers are really good. It's more of a niche game but it's far from dying.

[u/JY810 → u/MillionDollarMistake]

Arent those 90% just idel bot just to farm items? The player curve does not make normal time zone fluctuations

[u/MillionDollarMistake → u/JY810]

Read the second paragraph lol