Team Fortress 2 (TF2) might not be the biggest esport in the world, but it’s certainly the biggest esport final at Birmingham’s Insomnia Gaming Festival.
Valve’s team shooter TF2 returned to Insomnia 69 in late August 2022 and the event got the crowd roaring right into the early hours of the morning, to watch Froyotech beat Witness Gaming (with the TF2 crowd generating 100+ decibels of noise). Online, 4,000 peak viewers tuned in, with around 86,000 unique viewers.
Behind Insomnia’s TF2 events is a dedicated team of volunteers: EssentialsTF. ENUK editor Dom Sacco sat down with team leader Adam Lloyd and event coordinator Charlie Smith to find out what it takes to run such an event, the world of TF2 esports and what’s next for them. Here are some highlights from the interview.
On Insomnia being like a world championship for TF2
Charlie Smith: Because TF2 has had a weird origin story because it came out in 2007/8 when you had fallout with the Cyberathlete Professional League and the financial collapse, esports wasn’t in a great place, so when TF2 launched, there wasn’t that buzz for it. So it started on the back foot.
But as time went on, there was an audience and there was an opportunity to kick-start it into a fully-fledged esport. It’s entirely grassroots, so when you think about Worlds, CSGO Majors… there’s that full ecosystem, but for us almost everyone is on a volunteer basis.
Events like this are equivalents of TF2 Majors. Insomnia has decade-long history with TF2. When it comes down to it, the crowds will turn up, because this is pretty much the king of competitive TF2 events.
I’m really happy a lot of people turned up for the finals on the Sunday. They gave quite a good show. People in the BYOC area were saying, ‘who’s cheering at 2am?!’
It’s the TF2 guys, they’ve turned up again (laughs)!
“The Insomnia finals went on til 4am, and we ended up getting back to the hotel by the time breakfast opened, so we just had breakfast then went to sleep. But that’s esports!”
Adam Lloyd, EssentialsTF
On the idea of a potential TF3 evolving Team Fortress as an esport
Charlie Smith: I think TF3 would be nice, but there’s enough infrastructure and back systems with TF2, that I don’t think it’d take too much for it to gain a lot of relevance in the modern esports market. There needs to be an interest from the community and the developers to take that next bigger step. To grow it, there needs to be some uncomfortable changes from both parties.
Adam Lloyd: TF2 is in quite an interesting position, competitively because while Valve has put effort into things like a competitive queue, the problem is with a game that’s so grassroots like this, as a community we focus on very basic things.
We focus on the five capture points game mode and the odd king of the hill map, and the more mobile classes. We run class limits and weapon whitelists, which I think alienates a lot of the community and that’s understandable.
So I think a TF3 would be interesting because Valve would have to make a decision of which way they’d have to go, and for it to be an esport I think they would need to come more towards us. I’m not saying to play our way, but maybe they’d need to add more general classes or change things that give other classes more competitive viability. But they might risk alienate the fanbase that we are doing.
If they bring out TF3, some people will carry on playing TF2 as well. So Valve is in a tough situation, but I hope they see this and see what we’re doing. We do have contact with Valve, and when we worked with DreamHack in the past, they couldn’t believe we could get the word ‘DreamHack’ to come up on the screen of anyone playing at that moment.
We get in-game cosmetics which are basically medals we can give out to players, they show up on the Steam homepage, so while we have contact with Valve, I hope they’re seeing this and do come towards us.
The TF2 crowd at #i69 generated over 100 decibels of noise pic.twitter.com/azgQ5mc8Cm
— Esports News UK (@Esports_News_UK) August 29, 2022
UK esports talent in TF2
Adam Lloyd: The UK has become one of the most dominant regions in TF2. So, TF2 could be the UK’s game! The team in the i69 finals, Witness Gaming, were majority British.
With this event being in the UK we’re going to have a lot of UK players, and we have a lot of European and American players as well. Denmark is a prominent region within TF2 too. It almost feels like if you can’t play CSGO you play TF2 in Denmark!
Also, talent. Siege caster Jesse Chick started in esports at i61.
What’s next for EssentialsTF?
Charlie Smith: The immediate thing is in November, myself and some of the Essentials crew will be flying out to DreamHack Atlanta. We’re looking at expanding TF2’s presence in that sphere. It had history with DreamHack in the past and we’re looking to bring that back.
In DreamHack Dallas we did some other games, so we’re looking at expanding our portfolio into other little games and supporting other grassroots areas where possible.
We’ll have a look at more regional content, so smaller LANs in certain regions. There’s an event in Germany in November and I’ll hopefully go there as a player! The first time in a long time that I’ve played.
So long as there are people still playing this game, and putting passion in like we have, we’ll keep rolling it. I’m happy for Insomnia to be one of the homes for competitive TF2 so long as they allow us. We’re happy with how things are going and we don’t want to stop right now. The community gives us passion to keep going.
Follow EssentialsTF, ArchRhythm and CDSmithGames on Twitter here
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Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
