Team Fortress 2, a free-to-play multiplayer game that came out in 2007, just saw its all-time concurrent player count record broken as it crossed more than 150,000 on Friday. According to SteamDB, it’s Team Fortress 2’s best day ever for a player count statistic, exceeding the previous record of 147,360 set last December.
On June 25 at around 19:50 UTC, Team Fortress 2 had 151,253 concurrent players in-game. The surge in player count could be attributed to a new update which arrived this week which was a major patch fighting the bots that plagued Team Fortress 2 lobbies. The patch added a new Summer 2021 cosmetic case and a few new tools for managing kick votes and other administrative tasks on the servers.
Although there is some disagreement about what’s actually going on in the game as some players are reporting surprisingly bot-free experiences in the team FPS, while others are convinced that the surge is mainly due to the bot creators figuring out some new method of overcoming whatever anti-bot measures have been added in the latest update.
Another reason for the spike in players is much more likely due to a lot of recently lapsed players who have come back to check out what’s new after the recent update, which broke a record patch drought that had lasted for well over 112 days.