Back 4 Blood is as close to Left 4 Dead 3 as we’re ever likely to get, and no new Steam game can escape the need to analyse player counts – so here we are! Now that it’s gotten a full release after a few days of early access, Back 4 Blood’s player count is publicly available and quite impressive, though it’s far short of the heights set by its predecessor. (And that’s to be expected.)
Back 4 Blood reached a peak concurrent Steam player count of 39,052, putting it in the platform’s top 25 biggest player peaks for the day, as SteamDB shows. (This doesn’t count anyone playing the PC version via Xbox Game Pass.) As of this writing, it’s the number 13 game on Steam, sandwiched between Rocket League and Rainbow Six Siege.
That’s bigger than Left 4 Dead 2‘s peak player count today of 18,865, though far short of the older game’s 162,399 all-time record, set back in 2013. That’s not at all a fair comparison, though – Left 4 Dead 2 was given away as a free Christmas present from Valve the day before that massive record was set. Still, L4D2 has been hitting counts as high as 49,193 as recently as August 2021. It’s tough to beat one of the games that everyone owns on Steam.
Either way, it certainly seems that Left 4 Dead 2 has supplanted the original. The first L4D set its all-time record of 30,616 all the way back in 2009, a few months after launch.
Check out our Back 4 Blood review if you’re on the fence, or our guide to Back 4 Blood performance settings and the best Back 4 Blood cards if you’re already in.