I don’t know if it’s because of the media exposure of the McGregor situation, black friday sales, or something else.
But for some reasons the game is currently at its all time high on steam db.
2000 mores than previous Y4 peaks, a thousand more than Freelancer release, the previous all time high. And it rose to 34th steam sale (usually at 200, goes to 100 frequently)
(Because I doubt it’s because of the Food Critic)
(by the way, don’t forget that the food critic is currently running)
Huh. Could be a mix of all of that?
People checking out the game, eager to get “missing content” before it’s gone for good?
the Part One bundle is on sale at its historic low, but it’s at the same low price it’s popped up at in multiple sales since July.
We don’t really know if these are all full-price players, Starter Pack players trying it out, or Part One players getting into it, but…
yeah wow. some strange perfect storm of marketing, word-of-mouth, cheap entry fees and the weekend is happening for Hitman. Cool but still weird. 
The base game is on sale for 90% off, that’s probably why.
I really wish the all time high player count translated to them putting more effort in to support the game in Year 5 (offline mode, more than a handful of bug fixes each patch, legacy challenges/escalations being brought back, more than just 1-2 challenges a month, actual updates to improve Freelancer, at the very least making sure all in game stuff is announced in a roadmap ahead of time, etc.)
While I don’t really care about the unannounced challenges and FCs (they’re permanent after all), the shadow dropped ETs is what really annoys me. I commented about this back on the comunication thread and Samir actually answered saying they’ll fix it, and yet they’re still doing it.
Granted they were not in Roadmap graphic, and the roadmap article. Which is a incomprehensible mistake as far as I see it.
But the ETs were all announced in the related newsletter September 12th.
The only one not was the Disruptor returns. But it was announced on X/twitter at the same time as the Splitter was October 15th.
The newsletter is a terrible medium though. Took a month for someone to realise they were in it, and post them on the forum. To the surprise of everyone.
I knew about The Disruptor, but didn’t know that The Badboy and Food Critic were announced aswell, that’s my bad then. Although I agree that the newsletter is a weird spot to announce it, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who completely forgot that thing even exists.
New ETs were visible on the main menu but they moved it to Live tab so thats another way.
That design change is probably one of the worst design choices they’ve made. At least when ETs appeared on the main menu, even if ETs were unannounced you’d still see them when launching the game.
Now you have to make the effort to not skip past the Live tab to check if there is something.
