There are few video game titles as descriptive as American Truck Simulator. You drive a simulated truck across America. Boom, branding perfection. It might seem like a betrayal of that core concept to release an expansion that lets you trade in the 18-wheelers for normal consumer cars, but that’s exactly what the newly released Road Trip DLC is all about. Judging by the new all-time Steam player record the game just set, fans have been ready for the ride.
“American Truck Simulator’s all time concurrent player record has been broken,” developer SCS Software exclaims in a Bluesky post. “Over 20,000 of you are currently in-game, either behind the wheel of a truck or hitting the road with our Road Trip: Ford DLC! We cannot thank you enough for your support over the years.”
As SteamDB shows, American Truck Simulator hit an all-time concurrent player peak of 21,318. That’s the biggest concurrent player count since 2016, when the game first launched to 19,138 players. Those numbers might seem pitiful next to the biggest games on Steam, but few games have managed to keep an audience as consistent as the one that flocks to ATS.
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The Road Trip: Ford DLC launched earlier today with a selection of licensed Ford automobiles, including an F-150, Bronco, Crown Victoria, and ’67 Mustang. It’s essentially an $8 pack of normal road vehicles, which you can take to either cruise at your own pace or use to take on new classes of delivery jobs.
I’ve been playing American Truck Simulator off and on since it first launched, and while I appreciate the simple economic challenges of buying truck upgrades and paying them off by hauling industrial cargo, the real appeal of the game is just cruising the long, lonesome highways that connect the various pieces of the US together.
In real life, that’s an arduous process made all the more inaccessible by the rising cost of fuel, and each state border crossed is an unpleasant reminder of the political barriers splitting the US apart. Hopping into a virtual Mustang and cruising Route 66 as the sun comes up over the horizon, though? I can start to imagine the hard work, apple pie, and hamburger America we’ve been mythologizing for so long. At least for a moment.
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