Halo: Reach immediately becomes one of the most-played games on Steam

Halo: Reach
(Image credit: Microsoft / 343 Industries)

Halo: Reach just launched on Steam, attracting a huge amount of interest, and so many gamers were playing that it shot up to fourth place on Valve’s chart of the most-played titles on its gaming platform.

Indeed, it’s still in fourth place at the time of writing, only behind the three dominant gaming giants on Steam: PUBG, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Halo: Reach quickly attracted over 100,000 concurrent players according to Steam’s statistics, and peaked at a player count of just over 161,000, which is mighty impressive.

Right now, there are still 76,000 folks enjoying the shooter, which is more than the number of people playing the likes of Destiny 2, or GTA V, or Rainbow Six Siege.

So it seems that the game launched almost a decade ago – which quickly established itself as the biggest entertainment launch of 2010, outdoing the opening weekends of some Hollywood blockbusters at the time – still has plenty of mileage left in it.

Smooth running

Nostalgia is, of course, always a big driver when it comes to games – and indeed films for that matter – with many folks doubtless keen to see how Halo: Reach looks with updated graphics on a modern PC.

Or perhaps more to the point, how the game runs, with Halo: Reach optimized to happily play on a low spec machine, to the point where it achieves 60 fps in 4K on a 6-year-old graphics card. So the target audience being so wide in respect of the specs won’t have hurt the chances of this being widely played, of course.

Naturally it also helps that the PC port has been well-received, and by all accounts everything runs smoothly, and there are no glitches or show-stopping bugs.

Which are all good signs for the rest of the Master Chief Collection, when the remaining five games follow-on from Halo: Reach.

Via Wccftech

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).