16-year-old Team Fortress 2 has just beaten its own concurrent user record

Team Fortress 2 has beaten its own concurrent user record, clocking up 258,997 players earlier this week.

Whilst that may not sound impressive given the PUBG: Battlegrounds' record-breaking peak currently sits at a hefty 3.2m players, it's important to note that even though TF2 is widely considered one of the greatest shooters of all time, it's just about to turn 16 years old.

According to SteamDB, the game has never been more popular, not even when it switched from a premium to a free-to-play model in 2011. And the most recent record of 253,997 concurrent players more than doubles the prior record of 167,591, which was set back in December 2022.

The spike is likely attributable to Valve's all-new time-limited Team Fortress 2 summer event that introduced several new maps, taunts, effects, war paints, and more.

Team Fortress 2 isn't the only classic Valve game gaining traction, either. In May, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) once again broke its all-time concurrent PC user peak, smashing not only its own simultaneous user record, but cementing itself as one of Steam's biggest-ever games.

A leaker uploaded Valve's "entire asset repository" earlier this year, including asset repositories of Valve games as they were in 2016, including Portal, CS: Source, Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat: Source, and Half-Life 2: Episodes 1, 2, and Half-Life 2 multiplayer.