Team Fortress 2, a multiplayer game that came out way back in 2007, just saw its all-time concurrent player count record broken as more than 150,000 scouts, soldiers, heavies, spies, and the rest swarmed the servers Friday. According to SteamDB, it’s Team Fortress 2’s best day ever from a player count perspective, exceeding the previous high of 147,360 set last December.
At 19:50 UTC June 25, Team Fortress 2 had 151,253 concurrent players in-game. What’s driving the surge isn’t entirely clear – a new patch arrived this week, which added the new Summer 2021 cosmetic case and a few new tools for managing kick votes and other administrative tasks on servers.
There’s some disagreement about what’s actually going on in Team Fortress 2, as it turns out. Some players are reporting surprisingly bot-free experiences in the team FPS game, while others are convinced that the surge is primarily attributable to bot creators figuring out some new method of circumventing whatever anti-bot measures have been added in the latest update.
We reckon it’s much more likely that a lot of recently lapsed players have come back to check out what’s new in the recent patch, which broke a record patch drought that had lasted 112 days (with the previous all-time record for longest time without a Team Fortress 2 update having been an 80-day stretch last year, according to Reddit).