Team Fortress 2 Sets a New Steam Concurrent Player Record

Team Fortress 2 Sets a New Steam Concurrent Player Record.

Image: Team Fortess Jungle Inferno

Team Fortress 2 breaks its Steam concurrent player record 14 years after its release, thanks to a surge in players over the weekend.

It's difficult to think that a game like Team Fortress 2 is at the top of any player's game list in a gaming world driven by continuously evolving battle royales and inventive multiplayer shooters. Granted, Team Fortress 2 is a multiplayer first-person shooter, but it's also been 14 years since its release. Team Fortress 2 gradually dropped player count while receiving updates here and there, however it has surged on occasion. This weekend, the competitive shooter shattered its Steam record for all-time concurrent players.

To be honest, Team Fortress 2 is probably the forefather of many modern multiplayer games. The fact that Valve has continued to maintain the FPS with upgrades and cosmetics attests to its longevity as a fun experience. Not to mention the fact that Team Fortress 2 includes a plethora of mods and player-created servers that substantially expand the variety of activities in which people can participate. All of these are plausible explanations for why the player count increased, but Team Fortress 2 has also been battling with a bot problem for quite some time.

Team Fortress 2 Sets a New Steam Concurrent Player Record.

Team Fortess 2

It was announced over the weekend that Team Fortress 2 has reached an all-time high in concurrent player count on Steam. The online shooter now has 151,253 players, breaking the previous record of 147,360 set in December. Although many players have reported bot troubles, Valve's freshly released Summer 2021 Cosmetic Case may partly explain the unexpected increase of players.

In addition, a few changes were made to the Team Fortress 2 Snakewater map to improve overall movement and eliminate clipping. Despite addressing the bot issue, it's evident that the update didn't make much of a difference. In fact, Team Fortress 2 bots reappeared one day after the update, rendering the issue moot. Even if Valve continues to update the game after this, one thing is certain: addressing the growing number of bots would require a more permanent solution.

This isn't the first time Team Fortress 2 has seen a large increase in players that could be attributed to bots. During the Scream Fortress XII Halloween event in October 2020, the game reached a peak of approximately 130,000 concurrent players. However, it was later revealed that only 25,000 of the players were not bots. The bot controversy has only grown since then, and while it appears that Valve has made some progress toward developing a fix, there is still a long way to go.

Team Fortess 2 is now available for PC.

H/S:GR