Before very recently, the record for most concurrent people playing Half-Life at the same time was just over 6,000. Now, as spotted by The Gamer, this number has been more than doubled, with the new figure peaking at 12,310, which is a pretty significant achievement. A VOD on the LambdaGeneration YouTube channel captured their entire livestream of the event, which lasted just under three hours in total. During the playthrough, it can be seen that the most players in the game peaked at 12,280. However, a tweet announcing the record had an update showing that Steam had registered 12,310.
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This event, which utilized the Twitter hashtag #RememberFreeman, had been discussed last month. A couple of Half-Life fans wanted to encourage others to play on August 14, with the goal of beating the previous concurrent player record of 6,022, which was the number SteamDB had on its database at the time. The rules for the event stated that players must be in-game for at least half an hour in order for Steam to register it. Players also had to use the original game, so the Source build was not permitted, and neither were any of the official DLCs.
Given the sheer might and ubiquitousness of Steam, there are millions of PC gamers around the world that log on every single day. In January of this year, Steam hit 28.2 million concurrent players overall, which is nearly three million more than last January. Interestingly, both Steam and Half-Life were developed by Valve.
With the loss of Arkane Studios’ Ravenholm project, which would have been a Half-Life 2 spinoff set in the titular abandoned mining town, hopes of a new entry in the series are fading fast. An official third entry in the adventures of Gordon Freeman has been sought after for many years now, but is looking less likely. While the VR game Half-Life: Alyx was well received, many fans would prefer to see the continued exploits of the bespectacled mute scientist.
Half-Life originally released in 1998 for PC and was later ported to PS2.
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Source: The Gamer, Twitter
