20 years later, more people are playing Half-Life 2 than in the entire history of Steam.

A free giveaway, a major update and the celebration of the 20th anniversary of its release did their job: the legendary shooter Half-Life 2 from Valve celebrated its anniversary with a personal record for peak online traffic on Steam.

Image Source: Valve

Let’s remember that until recently, the best result for Half-Life 2 on Steam was 16 thousand concurrent players – a figure that was achieved in August 2021 thanks to the efforts of fans to coordinate efforts.

As the SteamDB portal reports, on November 16, 52 thousand people gathered to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, and the next day there were already 64,085 users registered in the game.

Image source: SteamDB

As PC Gamer notes, Valve only began tracking peak online gaming in 2008, much later than the release of the original Half-Life 2 (2004), Episode One (2006) and Episode Two (2007).

Steam’s user base in 2004 was much smaller than it is now, but theoretically Half-Life 2 could attract more concurrent players at release than 20 years later. Whether this is true or not, however, we will never know.

New Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Artwork (Image Source: Valve)

The anniversary update included both episodes in Half-Life 2, added a mode with more than three hours of developer commentary and new graphics settings, introduced support for the Steam Workshop and fixed a number of bugs.

Half-Life 2 was released on November 16, 2004, received the highest scores from critics (96% for the PC version on Metacritic) and earned cult status. The game is being given away for free on Steam until tonight (November 18th).