Earlier today, Valve unveiled the top games on Steam for the year. Valve unveiled a plethora of “top of the year” lists via a post on the official Steam blog. The categories Valve listed include Steam’s top selling games, top new releases, top selling Virtual Reality (VR) games, top selling games that left early access, and the most played games of the year.
With the list of the top selling games on Steam, Valve looked at a variety of different criteria to determine the game’s gross revenue on their online storefront. The determinate factors included game sales, in-game transactions, and DLC. However, Valve did not disclose how much each game made, nor did the company place games in order from most revenue to least. Instead, the company split the the top 100 games into four different tiers. The Platinum tier includes the top 12 games, the Gold tier includes placements 13 through 24, the Silver tier includes placements 25 through 40, and the Bronze tier rounds out the rest of the top 100. Overall, the top 12 games, the Platinum tier, based on revenue include in no particular order:
- Far Cry 5
- Warframe
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- Monster Hunter World
- Rainbow Six: Seige
- The Elder Scrolls Online
- Dota 2
- Rocket League
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Civilization VI
- Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
- Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds
Steam’s top selling new releases are separated by month of release, and were decided by “a combination of first week revenue and overall revenue in 2018” for each game. Steam’s top selling VR games and top selling games that left early access were separated into tiers like the overall top selling games of the year list with a top 100 and top 50 games respectively.
The most played games of the year includes all games that achieved more than 15,000 players simultaneously with division going up from there. The top of the chart includes 10 games that achieved over 100,000 simultaneous players and includes:
- Dota 2
- Path of Exile
- Realm Royale
- Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds
- Rainbow Six: Seige
- Warframe
- Team Fortress 2
- Counter-Strike Global Offensive
- Monster Hunter World
- Grand Theft Auto V
Steam is still in a good spot even with new online storefront competition from Epic Games and Discord. Steam is also in the midst of its annual Winter Sale, and voting for The Steam Awards is currently ongoing. Valve has also announced recent plans to bring a localized version of Steam to China in the future.