Hood Warfare 2, a $5 gang shooter on Steam, is going viral

A $5 first-person shooter called Hood Warfare 2 has gone from near-obscurity to one of Steam’s most talked-about releases in less than a week.

Given the nature of the game, however, it's also drawn scrutiny for its content, its anonymous developers, and the creators who've played it live on stream.

Made by an anonymous dev team called TrapStar Games, Hood Warfare 2 is a gang-themed, multiplayer Call of Duty clone set in "the streets" of Chicago, Illinois.

Like Call of Duty , it has killstreaks, including a "drive by" and a "snitch," its version of the UAV drone.

According to SteamDB data , it peaked at about 53 concurrent players on its Oct.

8 release day.

Its player count climbed steadily before spiking past 11,700 on Oct.

12, with its all-time peak now at 15,258 as of this writing.

By Steam’s standards, that is a modest hit.

The game's peak rank is around 1,151st all-time on SteamDB, and its current player count of roughly 4,000 puts it at 239th.

Still, if Gamalytic's data is to be believed, Hood Warfare 2 has grossed $1.1 million with 219,000 units sold .

As you can tell from the title, the game is a sequel.

TrapStar released Hood Warfare , a Detroit-based shooter, in 2023 to little fanfare, with an all-time Steam peak of 68 players.

Hood Warfare 2 caught on in a big way thanks to a deluge of content creators and streamers amused by the exaggerated stereotyping of Black American gang culture.