Team Fortress 2 has smashed its concurrent player record a whopping 16 years after it first launched. Team Fortress 2 was the long-in-development follow-up to Team Fortress Classic. It released in 2007 to extremely positive reviews and was a key part of Valve's The Orange Box collection. Team Fortress 2 is generally considered one of the best multiplayer shooters of all time, which has given it some incredible longevity.
16 years after launch, people are still playing Team Fortress 2. The multiplayer shooter has staying power that is nearly unprecedented. And in fact, Team Fortress 2 is actually more popular now than ever before.
Team Fortress 2 has managed to smash its concurrent player record. According to the latest stats from SteamDB, Team Fortress 2's new concurrent player record is 253,997. While some Steam users may be scratching their heads about how this could have happened, this surge in players was likely fueled by some new content that Valve recently added to the game. With no prior announcements, Valve released a big new update for Team Fortress 2 that added a whopping 14 new maps to the game and kicked off a summer event that will last until September 15.
Since Team Fortress 2 has been out since 2007, some fans may want to see Valve make Team Fortress 3 instead of release new content for the 16 year old game. However, Valve, for one reason or another, has almost never made a third game in its respective franchises. Not only is there no Team Fortress 3, but Portal stopped at Portal 2 and of course, fans have been waiting for Half-Life 3 for over a decade at this point.
With Team Fortress 2 breaking its concurrent player count record, one would argue that there isn't much reason for Valve to move forward with a sequel at this time. Clearly, there are many fans who are perfectly content with Team Fortress 2. And as long as Valve keeps releasing Team Fortress 2 updates and adding new content to the game, it's safe to say that there are many who will keep playing it for the foreseeable future.
Something that could potentially happen would be Team Fortress 2 getting a Counter-Strike 2 style update where its updated to work with the Source 2 engine. Nothing to that effect has actually been announced at the time of this writing, but it could be what's needed to make Team Fortress 2 smash its concurrent player record yet again.
Team Fortress 2 is out now for PC.
Source: SteamDB