Team Fortress 2 has just broken its concurrent user record
The 2007 shooter has never been so popular on PC
Team Fortress 2 has just broken its own concurrent user record.
Valve's fan-favorite shooter, which released waaaay back in 2007, just broke the 150,000 simultaneous players milestone on PC – a first for the seminal FPS.
According to Steam DB, before today, the game's highest ever concurrent count was 147,000 players – almost 5,000 fewer players than today's impressive new record of 151,253, with 147,000+ online right now as I type this.
"Maybe word got around that the bot problem is a whole lot better now?" suggests one player on the game's official subreddit. "Probably mostly older players joining for the first time in a while to see just how much better it's gotten since they last played."
Others are not as convinced.
"It's still counting bot players as players, I'm pretty sure, but also a lot of people probably have hopped back on to see how bad the issue still is, like myself," added another. "Been on about a two-year break."
As we summarized in our list of the best free Steam games, Valve’s evergreen team-based shooter is "an endlessly refined set of nine classes that both perfectly complement and counter one another, and from there you can make it as serious or silly as you want. If you want pure shooting mechanics, play standard game modes on official maps. Or you can embrace its wackiness, and the endless community servers, maps, minigames, and memes it has spawned. Collect hats and trade them in chilled lobbies, play a recreated version of WarioWare, or break out of jail while a team of guards tries to stop you. The choice is yours. Microtransactions are purely cosmetic".
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Team Fortress 2 is not the only older PC game that boasts a burgeoning player base. Thanks to a free-to-play event and a brand-new season of content back in March, Rainbow Six Siege broke its own concurrent user record on Steam earlier this year too, even though the shooter released way back in 2015.
The latest installment of Ubisoft's FPS series broke its own record for simultaneous players by clocking up an astonishing 201,503 concurrent users. That's more concurrent users than it's ever had before, and significantly beating the previous record of 199,307 users set back in March 2020.
Looking for something new to get stuck into? Here are the best PC games right now.
Vikki Blake is 12DOVE's Weekend Reporter. Vikki works tirelessly to ensure that you have something to read on the days of the week beginning with 'S', and can also be found contributing to outlets including the BBC, Eurogamer, and GameIndustry.biz. Vikki also runs a weekly games column at NME, and can be frequently found talking about Destiny 2 and Silent Hill on Twitter.