Red Barrels’ co-op horror spin-off has just posted the largest player count in its history. On 8 October 2026, The Outlast Trials reached an all-time peak of 147,955 concurrent players on Steam, a figure now listed on the game’s SteamDB charts page. It landed at the close of Steam’s Autumn Sale 2026, when the base game was discounted by 90 percent to $3.99 — the lowest price it has ever carried on the platform.
That distinction is the story. This was not a launch. The Outlast Trials entered Early Access on 18 May 2023 and fully launched on 5 March 2024, per SteamDB, so the record came about three years after that first playable build and roughly two and a half years after 1.0. A discount, not a patch or a sequel, produced the crowd.
What changed: The Outlast Trials hit an all-time peak of 147,955 concurrent Steam players on 8 October 2026, during a 90 percent Steam Autumn Sale discount. Why it matters: The record came from a price cut rather than a new release, showing how much latent demand a deep discount can free up on a three-year-old live-service game. Who should care: Survival and co-op players weighing a purchase now, and anyone tracking how back-catalog live-service titles get reactivated.
What The Outlast Trials actually is
The Outlast Trials is a co-op survival horror prequel to Outlast and Outlast 2, set during the Cold War inside a facility run by the Murkoff corporation. Players take the role of test subjects who must complete Trials and shorter MK-Challenges to earn their freedom, with up to three other players in a squad. gg.deals describes the loop plainly: “Stealth and survival are key, so don’t expect to simply blast your way through every problem.”
SteamDB lists the game’s supported system as Windows and its developer and publisher as Red Barrels. Its storefront data shows “full” controller support and Easy Anti-Cheat, running on Unreal EngineUnreal Engine. A widely-used commercial game engine from Epic Games; powers many large-studio (AAA) games. UE5 is the current generation. with NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR upscaling. On the platform side, the game ships across PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One. It has been live long enough to accumulate more than a dozen seasonal updates — a cadence that matters when a single sale week triples the previous peak.
What SteamDB records
SteamDB’s charts page is the primary record here, and it puts the all-time peak at 147,955 concurrent players, dated 8 October 2026. The same page, updated on 16 October 2026, lists a 24-hour peak of 60,179 players — the drop-off after the sale closed on 8 October.
The record did not arrive in one step. Trackers and outlets caught the climb in stages, and each figure is tied to the date its source records it.
| Date | Concurrent players | Milestone | Reported by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 March 2024 | 36,689 | Full-launch peak, the previous high-water mark | SteamDB via Gamersuniverse |
| Before the sale | under 5,000 | Daily peak in the quiet period | GameMeca |
| 5 October 2026 | 94,507 | First record of the sale | SteamDB via gg.deals |
| 7 October 2026 | 119,526 | Second record | SteamDB via Gamersuniverse |
| 8 October 2026 | 147,955 | All-time peak, as listed on SteamDB | SteamDB |
Two of those rows disagree with each other on the old ceiling. GameMeca, writing on 8 October, described the previous launch-window record as “30,000”, while Gamersuniverse puts the March 2024 full-launch peak at 36,689. SteamDB’s charts page does not print a launch peak of its own, so the 36,689 figure is quoted from the outlet that cites SteamDB for it, and the lower figure is flagged rather than smoothed over.
Why a $3.99 price tag moved the needle
The trigger was pricing, and the pricing was unusual. GameMeca notes that The Outlast Trials “previously maxed out at a 70% discount before this Autumn Sale” and that this was its “very first 90% discount”. gg.deals confirms the standard edition fell “from $39.99 to just $3.99” and calls it “the lowest price the game has ever reached on Steam”.
| Edition | Regular price | Sale price | Discount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard Edition | $39.99 | $3.99 | 90% |
| Reagent Starter Pack Edition | $49.99 | $4.99 | 90% |
The event moved fast. GameMeca reports that before the sale “the peak daily Concurrent Players hovered below 5,000”, then “shot past 30,000 right on day one”, and averaged around 90,000 from 4 October. gg.deals notes that the discount was not limited to the base game — the Reagent Starter Pack Edition was also 90 percent off, and “several DLC packs have received discounts of up to 90% as well” — and that the deal ran “through October 8” as part of Steam’s Autumn Sale 2026, which is exactly the date SteamDB assigns to the peak.
What Red Barrels shipped alongside the sale
The sale did not land on a static game. Red Barrels’ Season 7.1 update went live on 8 September 2026 at 10am ET, bringing a limited-time event called Chemical Leak. In its dev blog, the studio frames the event as an objective to “shut off the valves” and confirms it ships with “its own exclusive Catalog”.
Season 7.1 also added two new MK-Challenges, “Change the Program” and “Fund the Campaign”. Gamersuniverse, which labels the same update as version 1.64, reports the Chemical Leak event was “still running while the sale pulls in new and returning players alike” — so the discount and the live event overlapped.
Two other changes came with the same update. Red Barrels ended mod support as of Season 7.1, writing that “some can provide gameplay advantages or alter the game in unintended ways”. In the same post, the studio moved a set of quality-of-life options into the base game, including sliders for field of view and camera shake and toggles for motion blur, film grain, lens flares, bloom and the HUD. A hotfix followed on 17 September “to address various bugs and crashes players have experienced”, per the game’s Steam announcement. Red Barrels also used the blog to preview “what’s coming to The Outlast Trials through the end of 2026”, and tied the post to the original Outlast’s anniversary — “13 years ago today when we first entered Mount Massive”.
For context on how live-service horror sustains itself between these beats, our breakdown of season cadence math tracks how 6-, 8- and 12-week cycles land with players.
Reviews, estimates, and the numbers that differ
No single review count is the whole picture, because sources count different sets. SteamDB’s page lists 120,433 reviews with a 90.95% SteamDB rating and 111,040 positive reviews (92.2%) against 9,393 negative (7.8%), tagged “Very Positive”. gg.deals, by contrast, cites the base game falling to its lowest-ever price, and LavX reports “over 42,000” reviews, of which “Ninety-three percent of more than 42,000 English-language reviews recommend the game”. GameMeca counts only the post-sale wave: “87% approval from 3,838 reviews”. Gamersuniverse settles on “roughly 92 percent positive across about 93,000 reviews”. Read together, they describe the same game through different windows — all reviews, English-only reviews, reviews since the sale — not a contradiction.
SteamDB’s owner estimates also spread wide: roughly 3.60 million by VG Insights, 5.81 million by PlayTracker and 7.17 million by Gamalytic. Those are third-party models, not publisher figures, and Red Barrels has not published a sales number. The game’s store page also ranks #38 in daily active users, #220 in top sellers and #21 in wishlist activity at the time of the record. For a co-op title, our look at Once Human’s Xbox build shows how another survival entry has stretched its audience across platforms and subscription perks.
What the record does and does not prove
The record is real in the sense that SteamDB recorded it. It is also, by every available account, a discount effect. The two outlets that covered the climb both tie the surge to the price cut, and Gamersuniverse notes that “Red Barrels hasn’t commented publicly on the record itself”. That leaves the long-term question open: whether the newcomers stay past the $3.99 window. The 60,179 24-hour peak on 16 October — well below the record — suggests a large share of that crowd was sale-driven.
None of that changes what the number measures. A co-op horror game that fully launched in March 2024, on a base priced at $39.99, drew well over three times its old peak in a single sale week, three years after it first appeared in Early Access. The trial, this time, was a price.