Despite releasing over a decade ago in 2013 (oh how time flies), it seems that free-to-play online action shooter Warframe has never been more popular than right now. This week, following the release of the new The Old Peace update, the game's concurrent player count on Steam is rocketing towards it's all-time peak. Frankly, it's not hard to understand why.
While the release of any fresh batch of content is sure to bring in new and returning players, at least for a little bit of time, it seems even Warframe's team wasn't expecting the near doubling of players that The Old Peace has encouraged. Taking to Twitter, creative director Rebecca Ford posted a graph of players that shows just that, while writing, "we are doing our best out here to keep things alive but we were not expecting this much of a jump."
Steam analytics site SteamDB backs up the chart with numbers, showing that a high of a little over 175,000 players was reached on December 10 (the new update's release). The last time the game had this many concurrent players was in mid 2021, when a record high of just under 190,000 was logged.
Yet there is so much more to the success Warframe has seen. It is a game of constant iteration and improvement that shows how much the devotion of developer Digital Extremes has paid off. What began as just ninjas in space is now so much more, as evidenced by a speech from the team at The Game Awards followed by a trailer with Werner Herzog attempting to explain what exactly Warframe is.
As Twitch streamer DansGaming aptly put it on Twitter, "The game is blowing up not only because it’s still one of the best F2P games with a fascinating story and very generous monetization. The dev team has been really amping up quality of life upgrades into every patch over the last few years."
What is even more exciting is the prospect that 2026 has even more in store for Warframe. Digital Extremes has said The Old Peace is only prologue to a huge narrative shakeup next year. So that player count record from 2021 may not stand for long.
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