Steam’s Halloween Sale has come and gone, but it seems to have been a massive success for at least one Valve game. Left 4 Dead 2 might be a 12-year-old game, but put it on sale for just $2.49 and it’ll apparently still draw a crowd.
According to Steamcharts, Left 4 Dead 2 peaked at roughly 38,000 concurrent players last weekend. That’s more than its spiritual sequel, Back 4 Blood, which hit just over 32,000 players over the same period.
As noted by GitHyp, Back 4 Blood has lost roughly half of its players since launching back in October. Meanwhile, Left 4 Dead 2 had a record 2020 thanks to its first official update in 11 years. The Last Stand update came totally free of charge and presented Left 4 Dead fans with over 1,000 changes and improvements to pretty much every layer of the game, pushing Left 4 Dead 2 to peak at over 100,000 concurrent players.
Since then, Left 4 Dead 2 has averaged around 20,000 players, with a dip in that number thanks to Back 4 Blood’s release last month. But then the Steam Halloween Sale rolled around and practically gave Left 4 Dead 2 away for free, so now we have the utterly bizarre scenario where a 12-year-old game is beating a sequel that arrived not a few weeks ago.
But to be fair to Back 4 Blood, these numbers only include PC players, and we know thanks to Xbox Game Pass there are at least 6 million people who’ve played Back 4 Blood across all its platforms. It might not have the same beloved reputation as Left 4 Dead, but Turtle Rock’s spiritual sequel is at least a commercial success if nothing else.