Team Fortress 2 Finally Goes Offline On PS3 After 15 Years
Dozens, if not hundreds, of players could be affected.
Team Fortress 2
is one of Valve's most popular games, with the multiplayer FPS regularly among the titles listed in most played charts on Steam, despite not being supported all that much by its developer.
There are also console players of the game, but now it looks like one of these platforms is sadly no longer viable. TF2 arrived on Sony's PlayStation 3 as part of a package. And what a package it was. This would be The Orange Box, a compilation that included Half-Life 2, expansions for such, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. But now, 15 years after releasing on PS3, the servers for TF2 have gone offline.
The Orange Box for the PS3 was not done by Valve, in contrast to the the Xbox 360 version, with development handled by EA UK. The PS3 Orange Box received complaints for technical problems at the time, with frame rate issues among the most pervasive, and a subsequent patch made little mention of slow loading times or frame rate issues. While not the best support, it's also some credit that EA kept the servers running for 15 years.
Obviously, there will be sadness that the servers have to close down at all, but since lobbies have been pretty ghostly for a number of years it's not all that surprising. Servers for TF2 on the PS3 went offline permanently on March 28, but while the PS3 version is no longer it seems the servers for the Xbox 360 version are still running. EA has a dedicated web page showing all its offline servers, with TF2 being under "Half Life 2 for PlayStation 3".
Over on the TF2 subreddit, a poster decided to honour the closing of the servers. "After 15 years, Team Fortress 2 on the PS3 shuts down for the final time", it was titled and it proved to be a popular post, with many upvotes. "879 players without a game this is so sad gamers", someone commented in the thread. "There are hundreds of us!" came a jokey reply.
