Welcome, this guide will show you how to easily join and create public games in Aliens: Colonial Marines, since the integrated matchmaking no longer works.

Games like this are "dead", but that doesn't mean people don't still play them regularly. You can help do your part for dead games by simply joining my crusade and playing some Colonial Marines. Old games never truly die.

First off, let's set your Steam profile to public, allowing people to see your activity and join your games. This is a very important step, because otherwise there will be no way to join you.

-Go to your Steam profile, the 4th Steam tab that uses your Steam tag. Mine is HELLEKTRONIC, of course. Click "PROFILE" in the drop down menu. This will open your public profile. (Or, left click your account name/balance at the very top, and click "view my profile")

-Click "Edit Profile"

-Click "Privacy Settings" at the very bottom of the menu. Set all online and game info to public, especially game details.

This big change will allow players both on your friends list and not see your profile, see what you're playing, and freely join your game in progress.

Note: only certain screens will allow players to join, but players CAN join mid-game, which is awesome.

Be sure to set your Aliens: Colonial Marines lobby to friends only, under advanced options at the very bottom. This is essentially a public, joinable game now thanks to these changes.

Next, let's join a Steam group. This helps a lot when it comes to finding other players and seeing when they're playing Colonial Marines. Let's start with the Aliens: Colonial Marines community hub on Steam:

-There are several ways to get to the community hub for a game, one way is to look under the game description, another is under the "COMMUNITY" banner at the top of your Steam window. Enter the Aliens: Colonial Marines community hub.

-Next, click follow. This follows game discussions and allows you to join the official A:CM community hub chat group.

-Join the A:CM group chat. Don't worry, you don't have to talk to anybody or use a mic. Being in the community group chat allows you to see the activity of every member of the A:CM hub chat, and join their game if they're currently multiplayer in-game with the above privacy changes.

Once you join the A:CM group chat, you can join other Steam group chats in the same way, but many of which might be dead. I mostly use the community hub.

Now that other players can see that you're online and ready to play Colonial Marines, you've got a fighting chance. Let's continue to joining and hosting:

-Go to the Community Hub group chat, find a player playing Aliens Colonial Marines, right click their Steam tag, and pick join game. If their game isn't online or joinable, there will be no option to join, but you can always ask them if they'd like to play. If it is, you'll be taken directly into their game as if you are their friend.

-To host, first make sure you've got a good connection to support other people. Then, before you start the game, be sure to set your public server to "Friends Only", all this does is stop the game from trying to matchmake.

Once a game is created, players can join mid-game freely, so you can play in the meantime. Some things you should be aware of:
-If a host is using mods, you can't join them unless you have the same mods installed.
-Changing "teather" in the ini file MAY cause some people to not be able to join.
-Some mods will allow people to join with a vanilla game, but wont function properly.

So be very careful with your files. If you use mods like the overhaul mod, be sure to back up all of your files including your folder in My Documents>My Games. Even doing this, you should still verify game integrity after putting the old files back.

The short answer: Aliens: Colonial Marines is a "dead" game. This means the playerbase has fallen to a significantly low point, and public matchmaking will no longer reliably find games for you to join. This means you can't rely on matchmaking, it could be like half an hour with no results.

But using the tips here, and making yourself a public A:CM player, you will quickly find people to play with and make friends who also play. By joining a group chat, you can easily communicate and join games without having to rely on matchmaking. Do your part, create a game, join a game, have some fun with our xeno friends.

The final frontier of this struggle is competitive modes. To play competitive modes, you NEED to have a group of like-minded players. You can complete versus challenges with less than four people, but you'll probably not get much of a thrill out of it.