Unsurprisingly, 7 Days to Die achieves a new all-time player peak on Steam

At the end of last week, The Fun Pimps finally unveiled the long-awaited 1.0 update for its zombie survival game 7 Days to Die. Evidently, releasing the patch just before the weekend was a good move, as people have been getting to grips with the new content over the last couple of days.

So much so that – according to SteamDB – 7 Days to Die has experienced its biggest rise in concurrent players on PC. The most recent data shows that 125,419 had been playing within the last 24 hours. If you click the “max” button to zoom out over several years, you can see how much the 1.0 update has caused interest in the game to spike.

It’s also re-entered the Steam charts, where it’s currently at the number 15 spot for Most Played. This puts it just a little bit behind the likes of Rust and Stardew Valley, but it’s ahead of Team Fortress 2 which is number 16 in the list, so that’s quite something.

Will it last longer than 7 days?

We all saw this coming. Maybe it’s not such a big deal to see a relatively popular game suddenly experience a huge burst in popularity after a major update. But I do think not enough love is given to 7 Days to Die. It’s a little bit janky at times, but that’s partly what makes it so charming.

If you’ve never played it before, it is worth picking up. However, now that it’s no longer in Early Access, the studio did up the price, so you’ll have to pay more for the privilege of scavenging and crafting items while hordes of the undead seek out your fleshiest bits.

At the very least, you should check out the patch notes for version 1.0. It’s quite the read, and sort of gives you an idea of why a lot of fans have been waiting for the update to roll out. It’s still the same ol’ game that’s been around for over a decade, just with some extra elbow grease, natch.

This recent spike in concurrent players on Steam also kind of proves that gamers aren’t tired of zombies just yet. There was a period a few years ago where it felt the genre had become old hat. But if 7 Days to Die can keep bringing in the punters, anything’s possible. Well, not anything. I can’t put all my money on that claim.