How Many People Still Play Team Fortress 2 in 2021?

Team Fortress 2 was released on 10th October 2007, following the success of Team Fortress Classic. The game quickly became a critical success, even more so when it became free to play in 2011.

Although some online games suffer from declining interest and active players years after launch, Team Fortress 2 still has a thriving and growing community to this day. It recently broke its concurrent active player count record on Steam and consistently ranks high up on Steam’s most popular games list, measured by current players.

So, how many people still play Team Fortress 2 in 2021? Here we’ll be digging into everything you need to know about the game’s current popularity and what the future holds for Team Fortress 2.

 

Team Fortress 2 Active Player Figures

Although initially released well over a decade ago, Team Fortress 2 still has an active playerbase on PC, and that’s partly because Valve still somewhat regularly updates the game. According to Steam Charts, Team Fortress 2 has 75,000+ concurrent players as of August 2021, with a peak of 92,436.

Throughout 2021, Team Fortress 2 has around 80,000 concurrent players, which is an increase from the previous year when it had an average of roughly 65,000.

Team Fortress 2’s number of active players has steadily climbed over the last ten years, but 2021 seems to be the most it has risen. In January 2021, Team Fortress had 83,142 concurrent players but shot up to 101,230 the following month.

Since then, Team Fortress 2 has maintained around 80,000 players, but in June 2021, the game broke its concurrent player count. Despite being released in 2007, Team Fortress 2 peaked at 151,253 players on June 26th, 2021. The previous peak was 147,360 players in December 2020. For a 14-year-old game, it’s pretty impressive to reach record-breaking player counts not once, but twice in the space of a year.

Team Fortress 2 received a highly-anticipated update in June 2021 after going without one for a substantial amount of time, so the increase in interest during that month was likely due to this.

Much of Team Fortress 2’s playerbase is on PC as the console versions haven’t been updated in over 10 years. Servers are still running for both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions, and thanks to backward compatibility, the game is also available to play on Xbox One and even Xbox Series X | S.

Even with the lack of updates, there are still some loyal and dedicated communities that play the game on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360/Xbox One, but PC is where you’ll find the majority of Team Fortress 2 players.

While Steam Charts only dates back to July 2012 for Team Fortress 2, there were apparently 20,000 concurrent players between 2007 to 2011.

The game has tripled its number of concurrent players since 2007, showing that people’s interest in Team Fortress hasn’t slowed down over the last 14 years. However, it’s worth noting that a lot of these players may actually be bots, which we’ll get to later.

 

Team Fortress 2 On Twitch

With Team Fortress 2’s decent number of concurrent active players on Steam, you’d expect this interest to also transfer over to Twitch – but this isn’t the case.

According to Twitch Tracker, Team Fortress 2 has an average of 500 viewers on Twitch. In August 2021, Team Fortress 2 had an average of 456 viewers, with a peak of 9,600.

Interestingly, the game has actually never been overly popular on Twitch, indicated by an average of fewer than 300 viewers in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Although the number of viewers for Team Fortress 2 on the platform has risen since 2016, it’s by a very minute amount. The game’s highest peak of viewers was 80,009 on November 22nd, 2018, which it’s very unlikely to reach again seeing as its highest peak since then was 27,900 in June 2021.

Similarly to Team Fortress 2 breaking its concurrent player count on Steam in June 2021 due to a long-awaited update, the temporary increase in viewers on Twitch for the game in the same month was likely due to this too.

In comparison, Team Fortress 2 still receives a fair bit of interest on YouTube. YouTubers like Uncle Dane and SoundSmith, who initially started making content on the game over five years ago, still regularly upload videos on the game that attract a decent number of views.

 

Team Fortress 2 Revenue Over Time

Valve, who both developed and published Team Fortress 2, has always been pretty private when it comes to discussing their finances, so it’s no surprise that there’s not a lot of information about Team Fortress 2’s revenue over the years.

When it was first released, Team Fortress 2 was a paid title, but it switched to a free-to-play model in June 2011. Between 2007 to 2011, the game received hundreds of updates, all of which brought in new players and more money, according to Joe Ludwig, a Valve programmer.

During the same time, Team Fortress 2 quadrupled its revenue, which then tripled, alongside its playerbase, once it became free to play. The MannComony update in September 2010, which allowed the purchase of individual items, also proved to be hugely successful for Valve.

Valve saw a lot of profit from this system, as did users, who reportedly made $3 million by selling items on the Steam Workshop.

Team Fortress 2’s community skyrocketed after becoming free to play and, consequently, became a huge money-maker for Valve. Ludwig also mentioned that if Valve had initially known of Team Fortress 2’s massive success as a free-to-play game, then it would never have been a paid title.

A Steam data leak in 2018 also revealed that Team Fortress 2 had the highest player count on the platform, with 50,191,347 players, so the game’s community is still booming and, as a result, providing Valve with a pretty hefty income.

Additionally, Team Fortress 2 is regularly featured in Steam’s list of top-selling games of the year, measured by gross revenue. The list is split into four categories: platinum, gold, silver, and bronze. As you’d expect, games in the platinum category received the highest amount of revenue that year.

Team Fortress 2 was awarded ‘gold’ on the list in 2016, ‘silver’ in 2017, ‘silver’ in 2018, ‘silver’ in 2019, and ‘silver’ in 2020.

Although there are no accurate figures on Team Fortress 2’s recent revenue, the game is still consistently a high earner on Steam. Among the other games awarded ‘silver’ in the 2020 Steam top-sellers list were Hades and Final Fantasy 14.

Hades sold over 1 million copies on Steam, Nintendo eShop, and Epic Games by September 2020, while Square Enix’s MMO division saw profits of $180 million between March 31st, 2019 to March 31st, 2019. This gives you a general idea of the revenue Team Fortress 2 amasses.

It’s a pretty big accomplishment that Team Fortress 2 still manages to bring in a hefty supply of money each year, and its profitability doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon.

 

The Future of Team Fortress 2

Based on Team Fortress 2’s active concurrent players being at an all-time best and it consistently being a top-seller on Steam, the game looks great financially.

However, Team Fortress 2 has an ever-growing list of problems, most notably to do with bots and malicious players, which could impact its popularity and peoples’ perspective of the game – especially as Valve has done little to solve these issues.

Not only is Team Fortress 2 packed with bots that spam explicit links and racist comments, but it’s also rammed with cheaters and bots advertising paid-for “bot immunity” services. It even had its source code leaked in 2020, with hackers reportedly able to deliver malware to users playing the game.

Valve had been criticized for failing to effectively solve Team Fortress 2’s bot issue, but their most recent update on June 22nd, 2021 looked to fix this.

Alongside new community contributed cosmetics and bug fixes, the update brought in new anti-cheat measures.

Compared to the Halloween update in October 2020, which brought in four new maps and a huge assortment of cosmetic items, the update was quite minor, but the inclusion of new safety and security measures was a much-needed feature.

Prior to the new anti-cheat measures, some players from the Team Fortress 2 community created “extermination bots” that were designed to track down cheating bots and eliminate them, so concerns over the game’s bot trouble is pretty well known.

Unfortunately, even though the most recent update aimed to fix the bot problem, it only did so temporarily. One day after the patch went live, the bot infestation in Team Fortress 2 was back in full swing.

Considering Valve’s slow output of Team Fortress 2 content and their alleged apathy towards its current state, it’s likely bots will continue to wreak havoc and ruin – and potentially even endanger – players’ experiences with the game.

Despite Team Fortress 2’s stable yearly revenue and increasing popularity, unless Valve makes more of an effort to deal with the game’s major issues, they could very well see Team Fortress 2’s playerbase and profitability plummet.

Team Fortress 2 is available on PC, macOS, Linux, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

READ NEXT: How Many People Play Garena Free Fire In 2021?