The Half-Life player count on Steam has reached epic numbers following its anniversary update release last week, which includes restored content, improvements, and more. The surge in players is a testament to the iconic game which has managed to withstand the test of time since its release 25 years ago. Steam currently reports an average of 4,177 players, and a peak count of 33,467, which translates to an over 707% increase in just 30 days. At the time of this writing, it is averaging around thirteen thousand players.
Half-Life 3
Perhaps Valve will take the hint as the current Half-Life player count clearly indicates that there’s plenty of interest in the franchise. Fans have long hoped for a third installment, which Valve has largely been silent about but has not totally denied either. News regarding a third game has ranged from not being in development to rumored details about a 2015 project that progressed a bit and was then canceled. It was said the story for Half-Life 3 would’ve taken place twenty years after the second game, and involved elements of Portal 2 as well. However, it has also been pointed out that if the project were to resume this storyline would have to be changed due to the story events of Half-Life Alyx.
Per Metro.co UK:
“This build apparently began with protagonist Gordon Freeman experiencing a dream sequence of the Seven Hour War (which took place before Half-Life 2 and saw the alien Combine take over Earth) before waking up in Aperture Science, the setting of the Portal games.”
“Upon escaping the labs, Gordon would discover it’s been 20 years since the last game, several characters from Half-Life 2 are dead, and he is now in the ruins of a North American city.”
Meanwhile, Valve could use the renewed interest in the franchise as the perfect time to strike with news of a new project, while the iron is still hot.
Discussion (6 replies)
Join Discussion →Well, they gave it away free right?
Free tends to have that effect.
I grab tons of free games, hardly play any of them.
True, but look at the numbers. It increased to a "current load" of 4,177 with a peak of 33,467 players.
About 65 million users use steam daily, and there are about 125 million monthly active users, so even while this is a sevenfold increase in Half Life players, we are still only seeing 0.02% of Steam users playing Half Life at its recent peak.
It's totally possible that - like - a million people downloaded it, of which ~3.3% decided to play it.
Most people probably only download it, and then never get around to playing it, but a small percentage will play it, and for a game that was released 25 years ago, and that otherwise would have very few players, even that very small percentage of a decent number of people can amount to a significant bump in the stats.
Edit:
The hours played chart is pretty cool:
It was averaging about 10k hours of total playtime across all of Steam per day up until it went free, and then it peaked at 586,738 hours on November 18th, but has since dropped down to about 147k hours as of yesterday.
The truth is, while I struggled with Half Life back in 1998 when it came out, and it took me many hours to play through it, that was on my aforementioned Pentium 150 (pre-MMX) at 200Mhz, with my 6MB Voodoo 1 at 640x480 and 16bit color.
The framerate was not awesome. This was before the era of "60fps is considered playable". I have no recollection of the framerate I was actually getting at the time, but retro gaming forums suggest Half Life got 15-25fps depending on the scene on a Voodoo1. I probably had vsync on as well, making the input lag worse.
These days you could totally play through Half Life in a single sitting if you were determined enough. Higher framerates make the jumping challenges and fights so much easier even on the most difficult settings, and if you get stuck in a puzzle, most people will just google it after a few minutes of not being able to figure it out.
So, even if those who downloaded it and actually play it stick with it all the way through, it's probably only going to be a blip in the stats. They'll be at the end credits within like 8 hours.
A small number multiplied by a small whole number results in a small number.
The math don't lie.
Exactly. (I tried to sneak in an edit to my above post to add more content before anyone read it, but I failed :p )
That’s what she said