It turns out, a lot of folks are excited for a new spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead 2 based on player numbers collected via SteamDB. Back 4 Blood’s beta reached nearly 100k active players on Saturday night.
Back 4 Blood is being developed by Turtle Rock Studios, the original folks behind Left 4 Dead. It’s very obvious after playing only a few hours that Back 4 Blood is trying to be the Left 4 Dead 3 fans have long wanted. It features the same first-person multiplayer co-op action, with folks teaming up to fight off waves of zombies while trying to reach various safe rooms along the way. While it might not be quite as good as many would have hoped for, at least based on our time with the beta, the prospect of a (sorta) new Left 4 Dead has got people excited. Around 11: 30 pm EST, the beta had 98,024 active simultaneous players.
It was so popular it broke into the top 10 most played Steam games, as spotted by PCGamesN. It had more players in the last few days than usual Steam heavy-hitters like Warframe and Team Fortress 2. According to PCGamesN and data from SteamDB, the B4B beta reached the number 8 spot on the most played games chart on Steam at its peak.
As of this writing, about 75k players are actively playing the beta. Not nearly as many, but still a surprisingly high number.
Making this more 98k player figure all the more impressive is that right now it’s a closed beta state. So only folks who pre-ordered or snagged an early code some other way can play. The fully, truly open beta goes live on August 12 and runs until 16. I expect the player numbers will explode when that happens based on these early closed beta stats.
While the beta has been a big success on Steam and other platforms, it hasn’t been a perfect beta. Some server issues have left players unable to play. More oddly, Back 4 Blood closed beta players began running into zombies that seemed to be yelling the n-word.
WB Games explained to Kotaku that zombies weren’t screaming slurs at folks. Instead, two sound files were playing at the same time and creating the offensive-sounding word by accident. WB Games hopes to have the issues fixed by the time the game launches in October.