8-Year-Old Game is Blowing Up on Steam

Hello Neighbor, a stealth-fueled horror game first released in 2017, has just registered its highest-ever player count on Steam, thanks to a massively reduced sale price. Hello Neighbor has managed to impress a lot of players through its juxtaposition of cartoonish visuals and pulse-pounding chases, but the latest spike in popularity shows that some players just can’t stay away from a big discount on Steam.

The reception to Hello Neighbor has been a sharply divided one ever since it first burst onto the scene. Coming in as one of the most anticipated horror games of 2017, it ended up letting down a lot of potential fans through problems with its erratic enemy AI, low stakes, and generally unengaging plot, which centers around a teenage boy getting trapped in his neighbor’s house after sneaking in to investigate the death of his daughter. It sits at an 8 percent Critics Recommend rate on OpenCritic and hasn’t fared much better with players, except on Steam, where it holds a surprisingly high all-time satisfaction rate of 83 percent.

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Hello Neighbor Hits New Player High 8 Years After Launch

Despite its very mixed reactions from the horror game community, Hello Neighbor has recently hit an all-time peak for concurrent players on Steam, with 2,076 players recorded in the midday hours of March 22, as evidenced by Steam Charts. Prior to that date, the all-time high had been just a hair under 1,400 concurrent players, which was recorded in November 2017, when the game was just getting ready to leave early access, hitting its full release date on December 8 of that year. Older games on Steam usually only see spikes like this when a new major content update is released, but the last build of this home invasion cartoon horror game on Steam was added on Halloween 2019.

Who’s That Character?

Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.

Who’s That Character?

Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.

Easy (7.5s)Medium (5.0s)Hard (2.5s)Permadeath (2.5s)

Instead, the reason behind the surge in Hello Neighbor‘s popularity seems to be tied to its sales price, which has reportedly resulted in more than 100,000 new copies sold within the past week. Usually offered for $29.99, Hello Neighbor is now on sale at a rate of 90 percent off, dropping its price to less than $3. The Steam Spring Sale kicked off on March 19, which is the same day that Hello Neighbor‘s player numbers started to see a steady increase in activity. Although they haven’t come back up since March 22, that was a Sunday, and the peak player counts have only slightly declined since then, managing to hit peaks above 1,600 on each day since, which both still beat the old record from 2017.

The player-tracking charts indicate that a lot of the attention Hello Neighbor is receiving is likely from players who are picking it up for the first time. Those who are having a good time with it will be pleased to know that Hello Neighbor‘s 2022 sequel is also a part of the annual sale, and while its 75 percent discount isn’t quite as good as the price reduction on the original, potential players can still pick it up for $9.99. Hello Neighbor 2 received a slightly warmer reception than the original from players and critics alike, with improvements to its enemy AI and level designs, and while its inclusion in the sale has helped to triple its recent daily player peaks, they’re nowhere near record-setting.

The Steam Spring Sale will run through March 26 at 10 a.m. PT, offering big discounts on hundreds of PC games listed for sale on the platform. Anyone wanting to snag the Hello Neighbor series or other games at a discounted price will want to act fast. Fans looking for other great deals on popular indie horror games on Steam can consider pikcing up Project Zomboid for 33 percent off, Dead by Daylight for 60 percent off, Sons of the Forest for 70 percent off, and many more.