Brink is now free on Steam

Splash Damage's 2011 team-based parkour shooter Brink sold over 2.5m copies in its first year, but more than half a decade later its fire has nearly extinguished. To keep the forgotten game relevant, Bethesda has decided to simply give the game away on Steam.

There is still DLC, but it's all very, very cheap, with the most packs costing a mere £0.79 / $1 and the total coming to a scant £3.07 / $3.77 (or £4.07 / $4.99 when not on sale).

We quite liked Brink back in the day. At the time, Eurogamer contributor Simon Parkin called it "an exceptional team shooter, smart, supremely well balanced and with a unique, exciting art style" in his Brink review.

Controversially, he added "in moment-to-moment play, this is often a more engaging, tighter experience than Valve's Team Fortress 2."

Clearly the world thought differently, as these days Team Fortress 2 continues to have about 60k concurrent users a day. Brink, however, had as few as four yesterday (according to Steamcharts). That's not 4k, by the way, but four total.

Making it free has bumped it up a bit. Steamcharts now pegs Brink as having roughly a thousand concurrent players. Comparatively, LawBreakers tended to waver between 750 and 430 in the last day or so, while Battleborn, another free-to-play shooter, is only managing around 45-75 at the moment.