Despite being a 20 year old single-player game, Half-Life 2 just hit an all-time high concurrent player count thanks to that anniversary update

Crikey, Half-Life 2 just turned 20 this week, but despite that, and even thanks to that, it’s just hit a new concurrent player count peak.

Look, we all know that Half-Life 2 is one of the greatest games around. I’ve not even played it and I know that! It just is, but it’s also quite old now and in spite of having a lot of fans, it’s not like a huge number of people are playing it day to day. Except, well, right now they are, as just this week a big new update dropped that brought in a ton of improvements, as well as compiling Episode 1 and 2 into the base game. Not only that, but a completely new developer commentary was added in for the base game too, offering up some behind the scenes tidbits to one of the most iconic games around. And do you know what an update like that does? Bring in a whole heap of players, apparently.

As seen over on SteamDB, a tracking website that lets you see all sorts of insights on various games, Half-Life 2 hit a concurrent player count peak of 63,636 (love a palindromic number), the game’s all-time high. That was literally hit just 12 minutes ago at the time of writing, with only a few less than that in-game right now too.

It’s a ridiculously impressive figure for such an old game, these are the kind of numbers you might expect to see for an online title during a quieter period, but clearly an update like this has brought the fans out of the woodworks. Presumably there’s some new players in there too, as until tomorrow you can pick up the game for free to celebrate its 20th anniversary.

Not only was there a big new update, but an entire feature-length documentary too, which is well worth a watch if you’re a long-time fan of Valve and all its games – it even features an in-game look at what Half-Life 2: Episode 3 could have been (just don’t take that as confirmation that it’s finally happening).