Watch Dogs 2 is $2.50 on Steam and over 16,000 people are already playing it

Watch Dogs 2 is on sale on Steam for $2.50 — a 95% discount off its usual $50 price — until Thursday, July 9. If you want more content, the Deluxe Edition is $3 and the Gold Edition is $4, both bundling DLC that adds cars, co-op missions, outfits, weapons, and world missions.

The price drop has sent the player count surging. According to SteamDB, over 10,000 people were playing simultaneously at the time of writing, with a 24-hour peak of over 16,000 — closing in on the game's all-time concurrent record of 18,138. Not bad for a game that launched in November 2016. GameSpot gave it 8/10 at launch, praising its "effortless mix of covert and action-oriented gameplay" and a likeable cast.

Watch Dogs 2 casts you as Marcus Holloway, an Oakland-born hacker who gets racially profiled and wrongfully accused of a crime, then joins DedSec — a loose Anonymous-style collective — to tear down the surveillance infrastructure running Ubisoft's version of the San Francisco Bay Area. The themes land differently in 2025 than they did in 2016: AI is everywhere, smart devices talk to each other constantly, and the idea that someone could be watching through your webcam feels less like sci-fi than it used to. That cultural resonance is almost certainly part of why a nine-year-old open-world game is suddenly pulling five-digit concurrent numbers.

At $2.50, the barrier to entry is basically nonexistent. The sale runs through July 9, so there's still time to grab it before the price goes back up.