Halo: Reach Becomes Steams Most Played Game On Launch Day

Halo: Reach recently launched on Steam, and it immediately raced into the top of Valve’s charts of most-played games. After originally debuting on the Xbox 360 nearly 10 years ago, Microsoft has brought back the classic on PC with an impressive port that includes unlocked frame rates, a field-of-view slider, and even ultra-wide monitor support.

At its launch day peak, 161,000 people were playing Halo: Reach, catapulting it into the fourth spot on Steam’s most-played titles. While it’s now dropped behind Destiny 2, Rainbow Six Siege, and Grand Theft Auto V, Reach is now comfortably in seventh place. It was the best-selling game during Valve’s Steam Autumn Sale without even being on sale, which is quite a feat for a remastered collection of old Xbox games, particularly when players could only access one of them — Reach — on launch day.

Halo: Reach was a massively popular title on the Xbox 360, but it’s still impressive to see it immediately jump into the top of Steam’s most-played games now too. It’s the first Halo game to debut on PC for more than a decade, after Microsoft launched Halo 2 Vista on the company’s terrible Games for Windows Live service back in 2007.

Right now, there are still a whopping 76,000 players actively enjoying the shooter game, which is exceptionally 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.

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. Additionally, the overall positive reception on Steam would’ve been contributed by its updated graphics for modern gaming PCs. It has also been optimised to be played on several low-end PCs. If you have a pretty modern gaming PC, you can easily achieve 60 FPS at 4K resolution.

The game had a smooth and successful launch on Steam, and the PC port has been well-received among fans. As of now, there are no major glitches or bugs encountered in the game and by all accounts players are having an absolute blast.

Excitingly, more to the point, how the game runs, with Halo: Reach optimised 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 new game being widely played worldwide.

Naturally though, 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.

 

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