Originally released in November 2009,Left 4 Dead 2remains the standard for co-op shooters. Despite being nearly a decade-and-a-half old, it’s still actively played by tens of thousands of players each day - in fact, its average concurrent player count on Steam is higher than ever!
Related:The Best Valve Games Of All Time
At the end of each run, players get to see their total kill count. Considering the game’s main feature is endless hordes of fast, ferocious zombies, this number is usually pretty high. We decided to run the numbers and estimate how many of the Infected have been taken down since the game launched.
While the actual number is probably somewhere in Valve’s vast stores of data,we can only estimatehow many zombies Left 4 Dead 2 players have eliminated over the years. Player numbers fluctuate by the day, but in general more players means more dead zombies. Fourteen years is a long time, so there’s plenty of data that we can use to get an average -see belowif you want to know how I did it.
Left 4 Dead 2’s all-time highest concurrent player count occurred onDecember 19, 2013,when 162,399 players teamed up to battle the Infected on Steam alone.
The estimated number of zombies killed in Left 4 Dead 2 as of June 06, 2025, is1,371,499,045,806. That’s well over one trillion zombies, and over 171 times the current human population of the Earth. If youhad a penny for every dead zombie, you’d be tied for the 130th richest person in the world.
If you took all the zombies slain by players and left them in space at even intervals between Earth and Alpha Centauri - a trip of 4.367 light years -there would be one zombie every 29.3 kilometersthe entire way.
For all their numbers, though, the Infected in Left 4 Dead have nothing on ants; if the same number of ants were killed as zombies, it would only reduce the global ant population (roughly 20 quadrillion across all species) by0.0000685 percent.Groundedplayers have their work cut out for them!
Related:The Best Steam Games Under $20
How Was This Number Calculated?
In February 2010, a few months after the release of Left 4 Dead 2, Destructoid reported that the game’stotal kill count at the time was28,981,249,043.Using player count data fromSteamDB, I was able to estimate the average zombies killed per player per day for the period between the game’s launch and the article’s publication.
Since L4D2 was also launched on the XBox 360, I factored in console players by looking at sales estimates; this article assumes thatslightly more than twice as many copies were sold on PC as XBox.
With all these numbers, I determined that11622.29 zombies are slainper peak concurrent player in Left 4 Dead 2 each day. With an average daily peak of23133.88 players, this means approximately268,868,662zombies are shot, slashed, and blasted each day.
July 20, 2025, marked the 5101st day since the launch of Left 4 Dead 2. Multiplying 268,868,662 by 5101, I arrived at the player community’s astronomical body count.
