Half-Life
Named Game of the Year by over 50 publications, Valve's debut title blends action and adventure with award-winning technology to create a frighteningly realistic world where players must think to survive. Also includes an exciting multiplayer mode that allows you to play against friends and enemies around the world.
Action AdventureFirst-Person Shooter
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- Released
- 1998
- Developer
- Not recorded
- Platforms
- 3 systems
- Critics
- 96
- Steam Deck
- verified
- Download
- Not stated
What is Half-Life?
Named Game of the Year by over 50 publications, Valve's debut title blends action and adventure with award-winning technology to create a frighteningly realistic world where players must think to survive. Also includes an exciting multiplayer mode that allows you to play against friends and enemies around the world.
Description as published by the developer on its own store page, read 30 August 2026. It is marketing copy, not our assessment.
The record
| First released | 19 November 1998 |
|---|---|
| Developer | Not recorded |
| Publisher | Not recorded |
| Platforms | PC, PlayStation 2, Steam Deck |
| Genres | Action Adventure, First-Person Shooter |
| Languages | 8 supported |
Source. Catalogue facts from Wikidata Q279744, seeded 30 August 2026. Store data from Steam, read 30 August 2026.
How was Half-Life received?
Method. Player figures are Steam's own totals for the PC version, read 30 August 2026. The Metacritic score is the one Steam publishes on its store page and can lag the site itself. Metacritic page. Neither is our opinion. We have not published a review of this game.
Accessibility
Seeing
- Color Alternatives
Hearing
- Custom Volume Controls
- Stereo Sound
Input
- Full controller support
- Keyboard Only Option
- Playable without Timed Input
Difficulty
- Adjustable Difficulty
- Save Anytime
Method. Features the publisher declared on its own store page. A declaration is a floor, not a review.
What does it support?
| Capability | Support |
|---|---|
| Controller | full support |
| Cloud saves | Yes |
| Cross-platform play | No |
| Mod support | No official workshop |
| Online play | Yes |
| In-game purchases | No |
| Steam Deck | verified |
| Download size | Not stated |
| Add-on content | 1 DLC listed |
| Age gate | None |
Content descriptors
- Frequent violence or gore
- General mature content
Method. Read from the publisher's Steam listing on 30 August 2026. Describes the PC version. Console versions differ.
What does it cost?
Steam price in US dollars, read 30 August 2026. Prices move hourly and vary by region. Check the current price.
Is Half-Life worth it?
96% of 163,786 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Overwhelmingly Positive. It costs $9.99 on Steam, and critics score it 96/100.
That is the data, not a verdict for sale: whether it is worth it depends on the price you pay and what you want. Players do report problems — see the reported-problems section below before buying. We have not published our own review of this game.
How long is Half-Life? How long to beat it
Total play time for Half-Life is about 15.5 hours to do everything, and around 12 hours to reach the end of the main story. These are player-submitted times from HowLongToBeat, not our own, shown with the number of players behind each.
| How you play | Hours | Players logged |
|---|---|---|
| Just the main story: straight through the critical path | 12h | 2,356 |
| Main + the extras: story plus the side content most people do | 14.1h | 698 |
| Completionist: everything: 100% the game | 15.5h | 422 |
At its current price of $9.99, beating the main story works out to about $0.83 per hour. That is the price divided by the hours, a value read and not a verdict: a longer game costs less per hour, which is not the same as being the better game.
Source: HowLongToBeat community submissions, read 2026-10-19.
Where Half-Life sits on the grid
Compare the whole catalogueHalf-Life plotted on the axes the GamingPickz Score is built from, on the full 0 to 100 scale so its position is its real one. Change either axis to see where it lands.
1 games have both
Players. The share of Steam reviews marked positive, pulled toward the catalogue average in proportion to how few reviews stand behind it. A game with 200 reviews moves a long way toward the average; one with 200,000 barely moves at all. Without this a title sitting at 100 percent on nine reviews outranks Half-Life 2 at 98 percent on 278,000.
Popularity. A blend of two things that are not the same. Audience is how many people wrote a Steam review, which is a floor on how many played it. Reach is how many language editions of Wikipedia document the game, which is cultural footprint rather than sales. A game can score high on one and low on the other: a huge free-to-play title has audience without reach, and a landmark console exclusive has reach without a Steam audience at all. Where both exist they are averaged; where only one does, that one carries it.
- PlayStation
Every point links to that game's entry. The value map and the reception map are fixed views of the same data.
How positions are decided
No paid placement, no favouritism, live third-party data
- Placed by the published method, not by us. Every coordinate is computed from the axis definitions and weights printed on this site. Nobody moves a point. See the axes.
- Nothing here is paid for. No sponsored placements, no promoted slots, no arrangement of any kind affects a position. If that ever changes it will be labelled and sit outside the ranking.
- No favouritism, including our own. The 16 games we have written full reviews of are scored by exactly the same formula as the other 1,510, from the same third-party inputs, and they land where it puts them. Our own opinion of a game does not enter its coordinates.
- A position is not an endorsement. It says how a game was received and what it costs, not that we recommend it. Where we do recommend something, it carries a written review with a name on it.
- Fetched from live third-party data. Player sentiment from Steam, critic aggregates as published on store pages, prices checked hourly, attention from Wikipedia. Each figure carries its source and the date it was read, and we do not adjust any of them.
Estimated sales for Half-Life
These are estimates, not reported figures. The publisher has not published unit sales for Half-Life, and nobody outside the company can measure them. What follows is arithmetic on the review count, with the method printed below so you can check it or reject it.
How this was calculated
Steam sales track review counts closely enough that dividing one by the other across games with published figures gives a usable multiplier. This is the standard method for estimating sales from outside a publisher.
| Reviews on Steam | 163,786 |
|---|---|
| Sales per review | 30 to 60 |
| List price | $9.99 |
| Assumed average selling price | 33% to 66% of list |
What this cannot tell you
Steam only. Console, Epic, GOG and retail sales are not in here. For a game that sold heavily on PlayStation this is a fraction of the real number.
The band is wide because the method is imprecise. Review rates vary with price, genre, launch era and how insistently a game asks. Published analyses put the ratio between 30 and 60 for paid games, and we show the whole range rather than picking a point in it.
The owner estimate above measures something else. SteamSpy counts accounts that have the game, which includes free weekends, bundles, giveaways and gifts. It sits higher than a sales figure for that reason, and the two are not alternative answers to the same question.
Revenue is the shakiest line. It assumes an average selling price well below list because most copies move in sales, and it ignores regional pricing, refunds, key resellers and whatever deal the publisher actually has with Valve. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a figure.
If the publisher publishes a real number we will use that instead and say where it came from. Our editorial policy covers how we handle figures we cannot verify.
Half-Life price & deals: is it on sale?
We have one reading so far: $9.99 on 30 August 2026. Prices are checked daily from here, and this becomes a chart once there is more than one point to join. A single observation is a price, not a history.
Latest Half-Life updates & patch notes
Pulled from Half-Life's own Steam feed on 5 September 2026. Posts marked as from the studio were written by the developer; the rest are articles Steam syndicated from elsewhere. Every one links to its source.
- Almost 20 years later, Arkane's founder says he understands why Valve cancelled the Ravenholm game that never was: 'It all came down to the economics'
- I was excited for this Quake port of Half-Life until I discovered the creator's wild AI conspiracy theories
- A developer got the original Half-Life running on a 2007 Nokia N95 at a respectable 30 fps, plus it even works with a mouse and keyboard
- Half-Life owes its existence to one of the game industry's most formative figures—no, not Gabe Newell, the other guy
- "That lore terrifies me": Ex-Valve writer Chet Faliszek isn't interested in writing a Half-Life 3, as he wouldn't touch a sequel "with with a 10-foot pole"
- This very normal Half-Life mod lets you play as 'queen of spacetime' Max Caulfield, and it's convinced me that the next Life is Strange should be a full-on boomer shooter
What readers say about Half-Life
Reviews written by people who have played it. These are separate from the GamingPickz Score and are never averaged into it: that score comes from thousands of Steam reviews with a sample-size correction, and a handful of unverified ratings would distort it rather than improve it.
Loading reviews…
Problems players report
We read the 300 most recent negative Steam reviews of Half-Life on 30 August 2026 and counted what they mention. These are complaints, not confirmed defects: we have not reproduced any of them, and a review describes one person's machine. What the counts tell you is which problems more than one person ran into.
- Performance and stutter9 of 300 (3%)
But if you’re simply looking for a fun FPS to play in 2026, I honestly think your time is better spent elsewhere.
Steam review, 11 July 2026 · 16 hours played · 11 readers marked it helpfulI know it was extremely good for it's time and it's the groundwork for basicly all modern FPS games, but the flaws just make me loose interest.
Steam review, 2 January 2026 · 9 hours played · 6 readers marked it helpful - Softlocks and broken quests9 of 300 (3%)
Level 6 soft lock that will break your game.
Steam review, 18 July 2026 · 4 hours played · 3 readers marked it helpfulI wanted to play this game to see if it would be fun but no I have soft locked my self a ton of times and The floor is made of baby oil.
Steam review, 17 July 2026 · 12 hours played · 3 readers marked it helpful
A further 13 reviews call the game buggy or broken without saying how, which is why they are counted separately rather than assigned to a theme. Counted by keyword across review text, so a review discussing two problems is counted under both. Read the reviews yourself.
Did it run on your PC?
Tell other players how it ran on your machine. One tap, from your saved PC if you have one.
Where Half-Life appears
The ranked lists and finder pages Half-Life qualifies for, from its own genre and platform to what it takes to run.
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Games like Half-Life
24 games overlap with Half-Life on the tags Steam players applied to it, on genre, and on theme. The closest are Half-Life: Opposing Force, Half-Life: Blue Shift and Half-Life: Source.
Part of the Half-Life series
Half-Life is one of 12 Half-Life games we track. See the whole series ranked by the GamingPickz Score, plotted on the grid, and listed in release order:
Half-Life head to head
See Half-Life compared side by side, on score, price, specs and more:
More Half-Life comparisons: vs Lethal Company, vs Schedule I, vs Red Dead Redemption 2, vs Resident Evil 4, vs Terraria, vs Tomb Raider Game of the Year, vs It Takes Two, vs God of War, vs Batman: Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition, vs Batman: Arkham City - Game of the Year Edition, vs Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, vs Tomb Raider, vs Portal, vs Left 4 Dead 2, vs Counter-Strike, vs Team Fortress 2, vs Counter-Strike: Source, vs ULTRAKILL, vs Titanfall 2, vs Garry's Mod, vs Half-Life: Alyx, vs Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, vs Half-Life Deathmatch: Source
Common questions about Half-Life
What platforms is Half-Life on?
Half-Life is available on PC, PlayStation 2, Steam Deck. It first released in 1998.
How much does Half-Life cost?
$9.99 on Steam in the United States, read on 30 August 2026. Prices move often and vary by region, so check the store before buying.
Do players recommend Half-Life?
96% of 163,786 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Overwhelmingly Positive. That is players rating it, not our review. We have not published a review of this game.
What is the Metacritic score for Half-Life?
96 out of 100 for the PC version, as published on the game's own Steam store page. Steam can lag Metacritic by a few points.
Does Half-Life work on Steam Deck?
Valve rates Half-Life as verified on the Steam Deck, from its own testing. That means it works out of the box with no configuration.
Is Half-Life worth it in 2026?
96% of 163,786 Steam reviews are positive (Overwhelmingly Positive), and it is $9.99 on steam. That is the strongest signal we hold; "worth it" depends on the price you pay and what you want, so weigh the sentiment against the current price above.
Is Half-Life on sale?
Not at the moment. Half-Life is at its $9.99 list price on Steam, read on 30 August 2026. It has been cheaper before; the price history above shows when.
How long does it take to beat Half-Life?
about 12 hours for the main story, 14.1 hours with the main extras, 15.5 hours to complete everything, from HowLongToBeat's player-submitted times. These are community medians, so your own run may be shorter or longer.
Is Half-Life worth the money?
At $9.99 for about 12 hours to beat the main story, Half-Life works out to roughly $0.83 per hour. That is a value read, not a verdict: a longer game costs less per hour, which is not the same as being better. Weigh it against the review sentiment above.