Half-Life 2 celebrated its 20th anniversary last week. The iconic first-person shooter attracted a huge audience over the weekend thanks to several festive events from Valve.
On November 16, Valve released a new update for Half-Life 2, which includes additional commentary from the devs, Episodes One and Two, as well as numerous bug fixes and improvements. The game now also has new graphics options and integrated Steam Workshop support.
As if this weren’t enough, the complete edition of Half-Life 2 is free-to-keep on Steam before November 18.
As a result, the game reached a new all-time high of 64,085 concurrent players on November 17 (via SteamDB). The previous milestone of 16.1k CCU was reached during a special community event in August 2021, when players gathered to break the game’s peak player count record.
Thanks to 64k CCU, Half-Life ranked as 28th most played title on Steam yesterday, right between Once Human (64.6k CCU) and Team Fortress 2 (63.9k CCU). Despite being free-to-play, this is still an impressive result for a 20-year game.
It is worth noting that most people likely enjoyed Half-Life 2 at the time of its launch, so the actual peak player count might be higher. As SteamDB explained, “We only have data going back to 2008, so we don’t really know how many played on its original release.”
To celebrate Half-Life 2’s 20th anniversary, Valve released a two-hour documentary about the game. “It’s about a lot more than just the making of a game. Running out of money. Getting hacked, and an early version being leaked online. Being sued by our publisher. Trying to build Steam. It’s all in there!” Valve said.