Forged Alliance Forever: how a 2007 strategy game still has 1,000 players at peak

Most strategy games from 2007 are long gone from the online charts. Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance isn't: over the 30 days to 10 November 2026 it peaked at 1,190 players online at once on Steam and averaged 610, a level it has held for more than a year. The reason is a community project called Forged Alliance Forever.

Timeline

February 2007. Supreme Commander comes out, published by THQ and developed by Gas Powered Games, the studio Chris Taylor founded in 1998. It ships in Europe on 16 February and North America on 20 February.

November 2007. Forged Alliance, a standalone expansion, follows in North America on 6 November and Europe on 23 November.

2011. Both games arrive on Steam on 28 September. Square Enix is now the publisher on Steam.

2011–2012. The official online service, GPGnet, winds down. By November 2012 PC Gamer was writing that "GPGNet is dead". Fans have already started Forged Alliance Forever (FAF) to keep online play going.

February 2013. Wargaming buys Gas Powered Games.

Since then. FAF keeps developing. Its GitHub organisation, "dedicated to keeping the game Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance and related software alive", holds over a hundred repositories, with the client and API released as open source.

What Forged Alliance Forever is

FAF is a free, community-run client and server for Forged Alliance. PC Gamer's 2012 write-up described what it added over the official service:

• automatic patching based on the 3603 beta patch that Gas Powered Games tested but THQ never released
• ranked 1v1 and team games using the TrueSkill rating system
• larger games, up to 6v6
• live replays, with a short delay to stop cheating in ranked games
• extra game modes, units and a new faction, the Nomads

It runs alongside your installed copy and doesn't overwrite it.

You still need the game

FAF doesn't replace buying the game. Its forum explains that you link a Steam or GOG account once, so FAF can check you own a legal copy of Forged Alliance; that also stops people making extra accounts. Old CD keys can be redeemed on Steam.

On Steam UK, Forged Alliance costs £8.99, and the Gold Edition with the original Supreme Commander is £14.99 (prices checked 10 November 2026). There are no in-game purchases, so that's the whole cost.

What the Steam numbers show

Month	Average players	Peak players
July 2012 (first month on Steam Charts)	166	314
October 2022 (all-time peak)	–	2,072
January 2026	790	1,579
September 2026	639	1,233
October 2026	612	1,210
Last 30 days to 10 Nov 2026	610	1,190

The monthly average has stayed between about 610 and 790 since August 2025, drifting down slowly through 2026. FAF doesn't publish player numbers on any page we could read, and Steam doesn't count copies from GOG or CDs, so the real number of people playing may be higher than Steam shows.