Strange invasion on Steam. Forgotten games attracted huge number of players

Aliens vs Predator and Left 4 Dead are some of the titles that suddenly gained great popularity on Steam, and even the initiative of loyal players doesn't explain the mysterious invasion.

Alien invasion of fans?

The strange surge in popularity was first noticed in the "alien" shooter game, more specifically its 2010 release. Up until last week, there were around 700 players on dedicated servers at the same time, sometimes jumping to over 2,000 users. Meanwhile, on July 12th, the peak of AvP was more than twice as high, and today, almost 15,000 people were playing the game at the same time (via SteamDB).

The mystery was quickly solved, at least seemingly. Internet users (via Reddit) noticed that fans of Aliens vs Predator organized a "night" gaming session. Partly to help new players achieve their goals, but also just to have a good time in this forgotten game.

It would seem that this closes the case - a cool fan initiative reminded players of an old title. However, there are two big "buts." The "Night" from AvP was organized on Saturday, July 12, and that's when the "peak" of 5,000 Steam users simultaneously was exceeded. Meanwhile, tonight the game managed to break this record almost three times over.

Thousands of "players" and no signs of life

Moreover, Aliens vs Predator is not the only game whose dedicated servers were suddenly visited by legions of players. As one internet user pointed out in a comment on the thread about the peak of AvP, a similar phenomenon was observed in several other titles, including the first Left 4 Dead, Dino D-Day, Monday Night Combat, and the demo of STCC (which apparently is no longer available on Steam).

To make it even stranger, in all these titles, the influx of players began at roughly the same time: July 13th at around 02:30 pm PT. Peaks no longer show a similar convergence.

It's also worth considering that the surge in popularity didn't result in an influx of players on non-dedicated servers. In the last week, the record for Dino D-Day was 37 people in the game, which is a suspiciously low peak, considering that over the past weekend, the number of people on the player servers increased from less than 500 to between 2.5 and 14.2 thousand. Especially since there doesn't seem to be any increased activity on the DDD forum on Steam.

Bots, pirates, aliens?

So the suspicion arises that there has been an influx not of players, but of bots. Why would they bother haunting dedicated servers of a few barely alive titles that don't even have items to sell on the Steam Market? It doesn't seem that anyone else besides the mentioned internet user has addressed the issue: neither the players nor the developers have commented on these silent invasions.

Two unrelated facts may be a clue. Players noticed a long time ago that they had access to dedicated servers of unpurchased games, including Aliens vs Predator and Left 4 Dead (via Steam / Reddit). Apparently, these files are available as part of the official developer tools for all users of Valve's platform.

This is important because, at one time, we wrote about the curious popularity of Spacewar. This was supposed to be used by pirates to run their illegal game copies, according to Steam data.

Does the influx of "players" in the mentioned titles have a similar source? Perhaps, but it's hard to explain why someone would use these games for such purpose only now. It's also not clear which release would attract such hordes of virtual pirates. Of course, nothing launched on July 13 or even July 12, but on July 11, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 hit the market (and, by the way, the wildly popular RimWorld: Odyssey expansion, and a handful of titles in Steam Early Access).

Aliens vs Predator

February 16, 2010

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