Sons of the Forest's long-awaited launch caused Steam to wobble, and fans couldn't be happier
Valve's storefront just so happened to go down at the same time the survival game launched
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Sons of the Forest players are pretty pleased that they might have crashed Steam with their eagerness to play their new favourite game at launch.
It's probably not a coincidence that at around the same time the survival game Sons of the Forest was due to launch (at 5PM GMT on February 23) that Steam also decided to go down. It hasn't been confirmed whether or not this was the case, however, considering Sons of the Forest managed to peak at 253,509 players (according to Steam DB) just a few hours after launch, and that - according to DownDetector - there were 2,896 reports of Steam outages just an hour after the game's launch, it is looking a little likely that the two could be related.
Fans of the survival horror game are actually proud of what they achieved upon the game's release, with several fans on Reddit posting about how they were present for the great 'Sons of the Forest Steam Outage of 2023'. "I WAS HERE WHEN SONS OF THE FOREST MADE STEAM GO DOWN," one post reads. As I'm sure you were expecting, many great memes also came out about the event, some of which we've embedded below for your enjoyment.
Who Would Win? from r/TheForest
steam be like.... from r/TheForest
We can't say we didn't see this coming. Just under 24 hours ago, we wrote about the Sons of the Forest servers as fans began counting down to the new game. Considering it was previously Steam's most wishlisted game for a while, and is now the fifth most played game on the platform, it's no surprise that now, a day after the game launched, it has managed to amass a peak of 269,563 concurrent players.
Are you about to start playing this game? Find out everything you need to know about Sons of the Forest companions.
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.


