Team Fortress 2 has broken its all-time concurrent player record over 15 years since its release
Team Fortress 2 has set a new all-time concurrent player record of over 250,000 in the wake of the release of its Summer 2023 update. The surge in players was first reported by SteamDB, with details posted on their website.
The huge jump in player count comes as TF2 is set to celebrate its 16th birthday later this year. The game, originally released in 2007. The latest TF2 patch, the Summer 2023 update, released on July 12 and features new community maps, a Cosmetic Case, new community-contributed taunts, new Unusual effects, and the Summer 2023 War Paint case. The Team Fortress 2 Summer Update will run until September 15, and full details can be found here.
Beyond that there’s some quality of life fixes, including to the popular Mann vs. Machine mode, and some general graphical updates. It’s not a huge update, but clearly it’s gotten people in the mood to play the game.
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Team Fortress 2’s surge in players
With a peak of 252,282 concurrent players (at the time of writing) Team Fortress 2 is experiencing the largest surge in players it’s ever had. The game hit over 100,000k when it went free to play on June 23, 2011, and hit up over 120,000 with the release of Mann vs. Machine in 2012.
Bot activity peaked the player activity to around 120,000 again in 2018, but this update is the largest genuine growth the game has ever experienced. What’s perhaps even more impressive is that this hasn’t come with a huge surge in streaming or viewership. Most games that pop off on Steam, like recent Diablo-inspired bullet-hell survival Halls of Torment, or the Steam Sale hit DAVE THE DIVER
Team Fortress 2 was first released in October 10, 2007. Perhaps one of the most influential shooters of all-time, Valve’s role-based shooter laid the foundation for the likes of Overwatch, Splatoon, Rainbow Six Siege, and pretty much any Team Shooter you can imagine. It continues to be free-to-play on Steam.
