Let it be said that a simple announcement of a new Borderlands game can make players and fans feel super-nostalgic. At least for those who owned the PC version of Borderlands 2.

It seems that there’s a resurgence in the 2012 sequel, as it’s now one of the top 5 most-played games on Steam. The other games are CS:GO, Dota 2, PUBG, and Warframe.

According to a report on GitHyp, the game’s player count peaked at 60k concurrent players.

To put things into perspective, the game averages just under 10k concurrent players for the past 7 years since its September 2012 debut. The game’s all-time peak was at 124k players back in that same month and year.

Why is it getting this huge spike all of a sudden? A lot of reasons: the Borderlands 2 Handsome Collection remaster that came out this month, its 74% discount on Steam, the update’s remastering bonuses offered for free for existing players, and all this Borderlands 3 talk about it being Epic Games Store exclusive and whatnot. Take your pick; it’s like Gearbox planned for this.

It also helped that Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford stated publicly that he’s happy to have signed that Epic Games Store exclusive for Borderlands 3 due to the influx of negative reviews of all Borderlands games on Steam due to that.

Ironically, that this misuse is possible and that Steam has no interest in correcting this misuse makes me kind of happy about 2k’s decision and makes me want to reconsider Gearbox Publishing’s current posture on the platform.

— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) April 5, 2019

It also made Valve step up and released an update that prevented the influx of recent negative reviews from impacting the overall rating of Borderlands 2 on Steam. Good on them, I suppose.

Will you be getting Borderlands 3? It’ll be out 13 September for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.