Despite having released nearly 16 years ago, Valve’s Team Fortress 2 just broke its all-time concurrent player record on Steam. Within the past day, Valve let loose the first major update for TF2 that the multiplayer shooter has seen in years. Notably, this update brought 14 new maps to the game that were created in tandem with the community. Now, with so much new content to experience, Team Fortress 2 has seen a massive boom that has made it one of Steam’s most-played games.
Based on data from SteamDB, Team Fortress 2 set a new record for concurrent players earlier today when it topped out at 253,997 in total. Although TF2 has never become outright irrelevant on Steam, this is far and away the highest player count that the game has ever seen since it launched with The Orange Box back in 2007. Given that this record was also broken on a weekday, there’s a good chance that TF2 could even surpass this amount of players this coming weekend when more people will have free time to play.
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At the time of this writing, Team Fortress 2 happens to be the third-highest-played game across all of Steam. Currently, it’s only trailing behind the likes of DOTA 2 and Counter-Strike: GO, which are essentially the highest two titles on Steam at any given point. While there’s clearly a lot of excitement and interest around TF2, it will be worth keeping an eye on how long this momentum can continue onward.
In short, this revival of Team Fortress 2 is pretty staggering and shows just how passionate players are about the game all of these years later. The drastic rise in players also suggests that there’s still a lot more Valve could likely get out of TF2 if it opted to continue updating the game on a regular basis. Even though this surely won’t happen, perhaps it’s something that the company should explore, especially during the age of live-service video games.
Have you hopped back into Team Fortress 2 for yourself in the past day since the release of this new update? Be sure to let me know either down in the comments or hit me up on Twitter at @MooreMan12.
