A Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update has just released. In this discussion we will be looking at the player numbers of Half-Life 2 to evaluate just how big is the influx of players at the time of writing and how player counter decays as the time goes on.
By looking at the past experience with Half-Life 1’s Anniversary Update, an update that technically failed as it couldn’t help sustain the player numbers for an extent long enough, we can draw a clear parallel to Half-Life 2’s update we recently received. Half-Life 1’s update did not bring the game changes significant enough to keep the players invested in the game and it didn’t in any way improve the longevity of the first installment. Lack of updates and Valve’s attempt to regain the trust of players from the old times is cheap and didn’t quite help the studio’s reputation. Today, the studio is different and it instead focuses on games as live-service for the most part, as they aren’t able to make games powerful and strong enough as the ones developed by an earlier Valve the community came to know since the old developers left the studio. This current Valve studio is trying to feed off of the past and it can’t get any more apparent than that. This is why it’s important to evaluate the decisions the studios make at this day and age and give an appropriate feedback. As for the player numbers of Half-Life 1, the Anniversary Update leading the game to a heavy player number spike eventually made the game plummet after the realization of gamers that there isn’t much left to do in the game. This update in an attempt to drive on the past and regain the community trust in the laziest ways technically hasn’t implanted anything to help the game’s longevity. The update made players come back and replay the game for no reason, as the update wasn’t even that significant and didn’t improve gameplay nearly at all.

If we were to look at Half-Life 2, it is a more impressive game than Half-Life 1, but that doesn’t mean that the game holds up for the modern players. Remember, this is nothing but Valve’s attempt to act as if they are the same old studio that still has the understanding behind the game development, but their actions show otherwise. Many games they have developed after losing creativity and skill by maintaining Steam and live-service games for more than a decade have failed. Those games are Half-Life: Alyx, which is a failed experiment and a game that tried to sell the VR-headsets to Half-Life community, which is obviously very funny and doesn’t sit well with many old timers. Both Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2 Anniversary updates are clearly attempts to market those two games once again and bring those old games into the spotlight to gather more attention and potential revenue. After all, this update will indeed bring Valve more revenue by making players buy this game to their friends, to other accounts, to essentially replay the game for no reason, as there are no real improvements to increase the game’s longevity yet again. The public falls for the same exact narrative we’ve already seen with Half-Life 1. It will also bring players who never even played the game, but they’ll see that they aren’t missing out on too much, as keeping the modern player interested in a game like that would require way more than just a few marketing strategies and mild changes. None of it will help the game’s longevity and certainly won’t help the game sustain high player numbers.


The prognosis is very clear. We are expecting a heavy spike to Half-Life 2’s player numbers at the time of update’s release, then there will be a solid momentum for a while where the player numbers are at their yearly peak and then, weeks and weeks later we’ll see a slow or even a rapid decline in player numbers. Especially considering that the game doesn’t even have full integrated multiplayer support, but that didn’t help Half-Life 1’s player numbers. Then, after a slow or fast decline after its sustained peak and held momentum, less than a month later we will be observing a quick player decline slowly to the initial fluctuating numbers before the update. That means at its peak, the player numbers will hold for almost a month (they will still start declining slow after the ceiling peak where the player number struggles to significantly increase) before they significantly start dropping back to the initial numbers Half-Life 2 used to have. After the peak, the player number decline will be slow, but it will pick up pace and plummet down fast onwards.

Yet again, that means first we will be observing a jump in player numbers to its peak before it hits a ceiling where player numbers struggle to go far beyond a certain number where the player number increase becomes slow, then it hits an inevitable ceiling and holds momentum around its peak number and then starts slowly and naturally decline before it quickly plummets to initial numbers. It can be compared to a mental mood increase of a human being to euphoria, then the euphoria becomes stale, slowly translates to a happy and satisfied mood striving away from euphoria very slowly and then certain events or realizations happen that hit human being’s happiness as the mood declines faster and faster to what is essentially a depression. That means that first Half-Life 2 will jump high to euphoria, but then since there is no continuous game support and longevity the game loses a certain amount of player numbers which makes the game decline from euphoria to simple satisfaction or happiness and then a very quick fall to what can be described as depression, a fall much faster than a smooth transition from euphoria to satisfaction. This example applies both to Half-Life 2 and the community of the game reflecting their excitement on the subject and once the community realizes that the update is mild and didn’t really help the game, their excitement will quickly plummet and they’ll move on to other games.


We are now observing a jump from 800 players to 11,000+ players at the time of writing. This data will be updated once we see new changes.

This is the increase towards the peak from the low initial numbers I mentioned earlier in this evaluation. We are expecting the player number increase to hit the inevitable ceiling after the yearly peak where the player number will struggle to increase and will slowly decrease starting from there back to fluctuating around 800 to 400 players.


After a peak at around 50-60k players it seems like the game has already reached the final peak and is now gradually losing players, as it cannot sustain players in a singleplayer game that is not being supported for too long.


After reaching the yearly peak, the player numbers now are going down slowly. As described in the thread's contents such a decline will persist.


From the peak around 50k+ players, it dropped to around 18k which is a lot lower. Not even workshop can carry the game that's clearly not in demand nowadays.


Following what is technically an exact pattern of what has already been described in the thread itself, the game is losing players every day, meaning by the end of the month we are expecting the player number to approach around 1k+ players and from there slowly drop its way back to 400-800 players as usual.