20 years after its 2004 debuted, Half-Life 2 has broken its own concurrent player record on Steam.
According to SteamDB, the seminal shooter has secured just over a 61.7K player peak over the weekend, the highest number of simultaneous players the game has achieved since records began in 2008.
In fact, the number I’ve just written is probably already out of date – the number is still rising and has been all day, having increased several times in the time I’ve been writing this.
Given this weekend’s surprise release of a special anniversary update, it’s possible players are jumping back into the game to revel in nostalgia or possibly check out the new director’s commentary. It’s also possible – given Valve is currently giving away the game for free – new players are trying it for the first time.
If you haven’t seen it yet, in the accompanying documentary now available on YouTube, the Half-Life 2 development team revealed that Episode 3 didn’t make it after the team switched focus to concentrate on getting Left 4 Dead “out the door”.
“Left 4 Dead needed an all-hands-on effort to ship, and so we put down [Episode 3] to go help Left 4 Dead,” explained developer David Speyre. “It took long enough that by the time we considered going back to Episode 3, the argument was made like, well, we missed it. It’s too late now. We really need to make a new engine to continue the Half-Life series.
“Now, in hindsight, that seems so wrong. We could have definitely gone back and spent two years to make Episode 3.”