Team Fortress 2 Breaks All-Time Concurrent Player Record Nearly 14 Years After Release

Team Fortress 2 is one of the few multiplayer shooters around that just refuses to die. Against all odds, Valve’s first-person shooter continues to only grow over the years, despite the fact that the game itself isn’t updated regularly all that often. Still, this hasn’t dissuaded the game’s community from continuing to play it regularly. So much so, in fact, that Team Fortress 2 broke its own record within recent days for the most concurrent players at a single time.

According to Steamdb, which is a website that tracks active players across games through Valve’s Steam platform, Team Fortress 2 just broke its all-time concurrent player total mere days ago. For the first time ever, the game accumulated over 150,000 players at a single time, which is something that has never been done in the history of TF2. The player total specifically peaked at 151,253 players on Friday, June 25. Perhaps the strangest part is that this peak happened in the middle of the afternoon for those in the United States, potentially indicating that the game has a larger player base in other regions around the globe.

Again, what makes this so baffling is that Team Fortress 2 is well over a decade old at this point. The game first launched as part of The Orange Box all the way back in the fall of 2007, alongside other Valve titles such as Portal and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Since that time, Valve as a whole has largely not been too involved with game development, but that hasn’t prevented TF2 from maintaining relevance. The multiplayer title as a whole later went free-to-play, which is surely part of the reason why so many people continue to play it to this day.

It remains to be seen if this is part of a larger resurgence that Team Fortress 2 will have in the coming weeks and months, or if instead, this is simply a response to the new summer update for the game that just rolled out less than a week ago. Either way, Team Fortress 2 remains a pillar in the multiplayer space on PC and likely won’t be going away entirely any time soon.