Newsbrief: Valve's free-to-play Team Fortress 2 is getting more attention than ever following the launch of an update meant to squash the game's long-running problem with bots.
According to data pulled by the third-party Steam tracker SteamDB, the PC version of Team Fortress 2 hit 151,253 concurrent players over the weekend, a new all-time high for the decade and a half old team-based shooter.
That beats out its previous concurrent player peak of 147,360 set on November 30, 2020. As of today, Team Fortress 2 is still going strong. According to Steam's official tracker, the game currently sits at 112,866 concurrent players, down from today's peak of 142,190.
Of course, and as some people have pointed out on Twitter, there's a chance bot accounts contributed to the overall peak, but it's worth calling out that the jump in players came shortly after Valve launched a substantial patch aiming to address those very issues with bots in-game. That patch, launched June 22, adds tools to limit behavior often tied to bot accounts, like new restrictions on frequent name changes, changes to the vote-kick system, and "numerous security and stability improvements."