I had completely forgotten that Valve is working on an update for Team Fortress 2’s cooperative Mann vs. Machine mode, though my defence, it’s been a long time since we last heard about it. The prospective patch was announced in June last year, via a blog post on TF2’s official website that requested map and mission submissions from the community in time for this update—with a “fictional deadline” of August 27.
After that deadline passed, a brief progress report was provided in September. But for the past ten months there’s been radio silence. Now though, Valve has provided another snippet of info on the patch’s status on its blog. “We wanted to give everyone an update on the update we already gave on the update we’re working on, and here it is: We’re still working on the MvM update.”
That isn’t everything Valve had to say on the matter. But it is about half of it. Valve elaborated that “it’s taking a lot longer to sort through the new content and changes that we’d originally planned, but we promise we’re making progress. Thanks for being patient!”
This tracks with the progress report Valve gave back in September, where it explained that its request for community contributions resulted in “way more” submissions than it expected. At the time, Valve admitted it didn’t “have a release date for the update yet” but it would be “going through the submissions and working on it”.
Obviously, Valve could allocate more resources to getting this update out of the door if it wanted to, given that Steam alone has raked in an estimated $11.1 billion in revenue this year—not to mention the money Valve makes from Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and the tens of thousands of players still involved with TF2.
But that isn’t how Valve operates. The company’s flat structure means staff tend to drift between projects through a blend of desire and demand, and there’s been a lot happening this year that is likely to be of higher priority than updating TF2. This includes the launch of the Steam Machine and the upcoming release of the Steam Frame, alongside the ongoing development of Deadlock.
Yet while major updates for TF2 are sporadic, with the last arriving in 2023 and pushing player counts to an all-time high, the game does get minor patches on a regular basis. Earlier this month, TF2 received an update that added a bunch of community maps, cosmetics, taunts and so forth, with a flurry of smaller patches following to fix bugs and tweak parameters related to that update.
