Twenty-six thousand people are playing a game that launched in Early Access three years ago. Sons of the Forest is sitting at 26,500 concurrent players during a 70% off Steam sale, carrying an 88% positive rating across 126,570 reviews. The price tag: $8.69.

For context, most new releases on this week’s Steam charts would trade their marketing budgets for numbers half that good.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Endnight Games’ survival horror sequel has already blown past February’s 17,904 peak player count, according to SteamCharts data, with a 24-hour high of 35,846. That February average of 8,479 had looked like a post-January slump — the game shed over 53% of its player base after a strong start to the year. But the current sale, running through March 26, has reversed that slide overnight.

The pattern is familiar. Sons of the Forest spiked 201% in October 2025 and 137% in July 2025, each time pulling tens of thousands of players back into its cannibal-infested island. The game hasn’t received a major content update since January 2025, according to ComicBook.com, which makes the recurring surges even more notable. Players keep coming back to a game that isn’t even actively giving them new reasons to.

Genre Durability

This is the survival genre’s whole pitch: replayability outlasts hype cycles. At $8.69, Sons of the Forest offers co-op base building, seasonal survival mechanics, and enough horror to keep 88% of reviewers satisfied — a value proposition that makes the $60-$70 new release shelf look increasingly hard to justify.

The all-time concurrent peak of 411,804 during Early Access is long gone, but a game averaging nearly 8,000 daily players two years post-launch isn’t fading. It’s just cruising.

Sources