Sons of the Forest's long-awaited launch caused Steam to wobble, and fans couldn't be happier

Sons of the Forest screenshot
(Image credit: Endnight Games)

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.

CATEGORIES
Hope Bellingham
News Writer

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 12DOVE 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.  

Read more
Monster Hunter Wilds
Monster Hunter Wilds might be a bit too popular as one indie dev says their sales totally flatlined around the action RPG's launch: "We haven't sold a single game"
Monster Hunter Wilds trailer screenshot showing a young woman with long blonde hair tied back into a ponytail smiling slightly, pumping her left fist in the air
Steam has doubled in size in just 5 years, as Monster Hunter Wilds' launch pushes it beyond 40 million concurrent users
The Forest
10 games like The Forest to play for more testing survival adventures
Monster Hunter Wilds
Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, and now Dota 2 fall to Monster Hunter Wilds as it crosses 1.3 million peak Steam players despite 49% positive reviews
A Helldiver from Helldivers 2 stand proudly atop a pile of Terminids.
Helldivers 2 lead thought it would bang, but not that hard: "We were prepared for having 150,000 players peak CCU"
Palworld
Palworld's multi-million player launch was originally in the hands of just one server guy who was "trying his best"
Latest in Survival
A misty, forested mountainside in Prologue: Go Wayback!
PUBG creator's wilderness survival game actually draws inspiration from an unexpected place - a whole raft of zombie games like DayZ, Project Zomboid, and Left 4 Dead
Terraria art showing a short-haired blond man sitting atop a grassy field in metal armor, colorful slimes on either side of him
Terraria is forever: look no further than its go-to mod tool, which just hit an all-time Steam peak ahead of surely, for real, definitely final update 1.4.5
Solarpunk airship interior
The most popular open-world survival game in Steam Next Fest is coming straight for my JRPG-born obsession with floating islands
Cubic Odyssey
This 93% positive Steam Next Fest survival game demo wants to combine Minecraft and No Man's Sky with "RPG-style depth," and so far it's actually pulling it off
Prologue
PUBG creator's nails-hard survival game launches this summer for $20, and its new trailer shows all the ways it'll try and kill you
Project Artemis early render
PUBG creator's goal for his new open-world project is to make "realistic Minecraft" complete with real geology
Latest in News
Balatro
Balatro creator started "properly playing the game myself about a week before launch" and had "a pretty emotional moment" where he realized it's "actually fun"
Death Stranding 2 Collector's Edition
Hideo Kojima reveals Death Stranding 2: On the Beach release date, and the Collector's Edition includes exactly what I predicted it would
Kingmakers
Kingmakers is a strategy game about taking on medieval armies with a gun, but its devs thought the giant mech was too much
The Witcher 3 lead says "not many games" were trying to match the RPG back in 2015, and that meant "there was a risk" to making it in the first place
The Blood of Dawnwalker
The Witcher 3 dev says his new vampire RPG Blood of Dawnwalker wants to challenge genre conventions, but only if "we're changing them to actually achieve some goal"
Daredevil recap: The Defenders
Marvel fans are discussing which of the Netflix series characters would have survived the Blip