More people are playing Half-Life 2 now than at any point since Steam started keeping track

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Not bad for a 20-year-old game.

The G-Man looking at the camera.
(Image credit: Valve)

Taking a look at SteamDB, the hullabaloo around Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary has sent fans coming back to the single player FPS in droves: With a 24 hour peak of 52,027 players at the time of writing, that's more people playing Half-Life 2 than at any point since Steam started keeping track of concurrent players (or at least the data became available) in 2008.

Now that is a big asterisk, missing both Half-Life 2's original release in 2005 and the launch of the Orange Box in 2007. All the same, it's still an impressive showing for a 20-year-old singleplayer game. While pure nostalgia and hype from the release of Valve's 2-hour anniversary documentary are definitely big factors, the main driver is likely Valve's beefy new update to Half-Life 2.

The update has also notably consolidated Episodes One and Two, as well as the Lost Coast demo level, into the base game's launcher. The last big ticket item is the introduction of Steam Workshop support for modding⁠—hopefully a nice shot in the arm for the venerable HL2 mod scene⁠—but the anniversary update also carries a bevy of small fixes and graphical tweaks.

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Ted Litchfield
Associate Editor

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky.