for many years i used to play team fortress 2 (tf2). my feelings regarding it are complicated. i definitely spent too much time playing it, but i cannot deny that it had incredible gameplay and a wicked sense of humor for what it was. however it's also the game that pioneered the lootbox/microtransaction monetization scheme that's eating much of the industry alive. this might not be so bad except for the fact that in terms of major updates, the game has basically been abandoned for years. when i quit about 3 years ago, updates had already nearly ground to a halt. a major update would come out about once a year, but they started feeling increasingly lazy and cashgrabby, mostly devolving into packaging up and selling a bunch of "community-created" content. there was also a whole thing where they basically just copied the cs:go "weapon skin" and "battle pass" mechanics into the game, because god knows people needed another paid grind event and more things with different rarity levels to roll and lust for.

despite their best efforts, i never put much money into the game. i guess i have my dad to thank/blame for this, as he was a legendary cheapskate who never ceased pointing out everything that he thought was overpriced or a a scam when i was a kid. i still never play crane games or order soda at restaurants. the one thing i did go in for was the battle passes because they seemed like an alright deal. they'd make the game more interesting with missions and you'd get a decent amount of item rewards. however, you'd also get exclusive crates (loot boxes) from them, which was just great since i always love it when you spend money to get the privilege of being able to spend money on something else. as a result, i'd always let all the crates from battle passes gather dust in the depths of my inventory, unopened.

the other day, i logged into my steam account for probably the first time in two years or so. i was curious, so i had a look at how tf2 is going along without actually playing it. i wasn't that surprised to find out there hadsn't been a single major update since i quit three years ago. it seems the extent of valve's involvement since then has been minor maintenance fixes and popping up every six months or so to crate some more community-created cosmetics for consumption.

what did shock me, though, is that somehow there are still tons of people playing tf2! when i checked steam's stats page, it was the fifth most played game, with over 80,000 players. i don't know if there's a livelier dead game out there. apparently earlier this year they even held a massive protest to try and convince valve to start caring about the game and make some new updates, or at the very least fix the major botting/hacking problem. imagine explaining that to gandhi or mlk.

i have to admit, though, now that i think about it i suppose i can't entirely blame valve for abandoning the game, it's not like they’re under any obligation to keep updating it with major content updates forever. it's free to play, there is more than enough content now to keep people playing for hundreds if not thousands of hours, and the game is now FIFTEEN years old with regular bug fixes and plenty of official servers still running. they've stepped away about as well as any developer has stepped away. even so, a game that's still running but that the developer seems to have given up acquires a kind of strange, dispirited "god is dead" atmosphere to playing it.

next, i peeped some historical player charts on steamcharts.com, and was even more dumbfounded to discover that there are actually more people playing tf2 now than when i quit. in 2019 average player counts hovered around 40-50k, and so far in 2022 they've been between 70-100k. absolutely baffling. how are new players even finding out about it? nobody streams tf2 and the esports scene has been dead in the water, floundering for years. are new players dusting off inscriptions of the tf2 logo in ancient tombs and finding the game after a quest to discover the symbol's origin? who knows. maybe the whole thing is still going off of pure inertia, an endless cycle of old players picking it back up for a bit before quitting again, introducing a few friends to it at the same time. or perhaps something exciting is going on in the community other than "notice us valve" protests that i'm unaware of? or maybe the player count is mostly bots, which were a huge problem when i quit.

then, i was also astonished to discover that all those useless crates from ancient battle passes i'd been hoarding are now worth a decent chunk of change. i kept them around initially because it seemed likely they'd go up in value. after all, their supply is limited and always going down as people open them, but i didn't expect them to go up this much. ⊕
a bunch of crates that had literally been dime a dozen when i got them 6-7 years ago as part of some campaign, that were still only worth a quarter each or so when i quit, were now like $5-$7 apiece. my total inventory value around when i quit was just shy of $100, and now it was well over $500. at one point earlier this year it had even been worth close to $700! according to my calculations, over three years my tf2 backpack value is up 485%. over the same period, the S&P 500 is up only 33%. that's one way to beat the stock market i guess.

the issue with my magnificent tf2 crate investment returns is that they're somewhat hard to turn into cold hard cash, unlike real stonks. it's easy to "sell" them on the steam community market, however the payouts are only in steam wallet funds. steam wallet funds are only marginally better than most fake video game money in that you can use them to buy video games themselves. overall i find the whole situation beautifully ironic. i have accidentally made a petty fortune through my past gaming efforts which can pretty much only be used to buy more video games, but i don't even really play video games anymore. such is life.