Nearly 16 years after its release, Team Fortress 2 maintains a strong player base. Here is how the latest update helped Valve’s multiplayer shooter set its new record for peak concurrent users.
On July 12, Valve released a patch for Team Fortress 2, which not only included a number of regular fixes and stability improvements, but also added a lot of new content.
For example, the summer updates brought 14 new community-created maps, as well as new taunts and effects.
As a result, Team Fortress 2’s CCU count began to skyrocket, peaking at 245,594 concurrent players (via SteamDB). This significantly exceeds the previous record of 167,951 CCU set in December 2022.
Prior to the latest update, the number of concurrent players in Team Fortress 2 was between 100k-130k. At the moment of writing, the CCU count is still growing, indicating a strong interest from the community.
Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007 as part of Valve’s Organe Box collection, which also included Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Portal. Developed by John Cook and Robin Walker, designers of the 1996 Quake mod Team Fortress Classic, the game became hugely popular and eventually went free-to-play in 2011.
Team Fortress 2 is also known as a testing ground used by Valve to implement various customization options and lay the foundations for games-as-a-service as we know them today.
