Valve Software announced the 100 best-performing games of the year on its Steam digital store. Although there are not many surprises, this still indicates that, in the games industry, the concept of a simple end-of-year analysis is quickly becoming a historic artifact. Many of the “games of the year” for 2020, especially on Steam, were not really new releases.
The way Valve presents Steam’s best sellers is an interesting counterpoint to many of the other year-end lists, which naturally were more focused on what was released in the last 12 months. While Valve’s thumb is slightly on the scale here, since her own games, like Team Fortress 2 They are perennial high-income earners in your store, Steam Top 100 presents a more complete picture of the general market than a simple annual can.
The most recent list shows that in 2020, making money from publishing games is not just finding an audience, especially on the PC. It’s about keeping it for as long as possible, and Steam’s most profitable games have managed to hold the attention of their communities for years.
As usual, Valve based in Bellevue, Washington, measures the annual performance of a game by its overall gross revenue, not just sales of individual units. This includes content packs, expansions, cosmetics purchases, in-app currencies and other varied revenue streams. Valve also does not provide hard and fast numbers on the subject, preferring to assign games in one of four categories – Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze – based on its overall financial performance. We know the 12 best games of the year in general, since they won a Platinum rating, but not exactly how they fared in relation to each other.
As has become the norm, only a handful of 2020 releases were among the highest grossing games of the year. Of the 12 games that reached Platinum on the Steam chart, only three – Doom Eternal, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, and Cyberpunk 2077 – really came out in the past 12 months.
Expand this to the top 40 games in general, in the Platinum, Gold and Silver ratings, and that just adds another five modern releases: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, Baldur’s Gate 3, Phasmophobia, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Hades. Of the full top 100 for 2020, only 31 of them were released on Steam this year, and a handful of them are recent versions of older games, like Hideo Kojima’s 2019 dream logic adventure Death Stranding.
Valve also struck a deal with California-based mega-publisher Electronic Arts to bring some of its games to Steam in early September, which were previously sold only at EA’s personal online store. The result is that some of Steam’s best-performing games this year are home to some of EA’s latest winners, such as the Sims 4 and the one-on-one hero shooter Apex Legends.
The rest of the top 100 are a variety of “games as a service” that launch new content for their players throughout the year, that is, from Microsoft Sea of thieves; titles with major recent expansions, such as the free-to-play dungeon tracker Way of exile; and a handful of perennial bestsellers, like Grand Theft Auto V, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, and the action-adventure sandbox Terraria, which released its fourth and last major update in May.
The highest grossing games on Steam this year are, in the order that Valve introduced them:
- DOTA 2, Valve’s own multiplayer battle arena
- Doom Eternal, the latest installment of id Software’s classic shooter series
- Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, a friendly competitive game in which players try to be the last to fall off a cartoon obstacle course
- Grand Theft Auto V, the second best-selling game of all time, powered by its multiplayer sandbox GTA Online
- Monster Hunter World, the latest and most popular entry in Capcom’s best-selling fantasy survival series
- Red Dead Redemption II, which was transferred to Steam at the end of last year
- Rainbow Six: Siege, which successfully combines the pseudo-realistic action of its series with the “hero shooter” mechanics of something like Overwatch
- Counterattack, Valve’s seemingly eternal face to face
- PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the original “real battle” experience
- Among us, this year’s sudden viral success story
- Destination 2, taking advantage of the launch of its most recent expansion, Beyond the light
- Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red’s science fiction RPG
Some other major Pacific Northwest winners on Steam in 2020 include 343 Industries’ Halo: The Master Chief Collection, a compilation of the first four areola games that made their late debut on Steam in late 2019; Holding, a survival / adventure published by Xbox Game Studios about children that have been reduced to microscopic sizes; Independent agricultural success from ConcernedApe Stardew Valley, which released a major content update on Monday with its 1.5 patch; Marvel Avengers, developed in Bellevue, Washington, by Crystal Dynamics, which instructs players to rebuild the famous team of superheroes; and Valve herself Half-life: Alyx, which recently won industry awards as a virtual reality “killer app”.
2020 was a good year for Steam, as life under the COVID-19 pandemic left many people without much else to do but play more video games. The service broke its own simultaneous player count record three times over the year, reaching almost 24.7 million simultaneous users on December 12. This is assumed to be related to the December 10 launch of Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most anticipated games of the year and that really works reasonably well on high-end PCs.
Steam celebrated its 17º birthday in September. Founded initially as a specialized client to make it easier for players of games developed by Valve, such as Half life to find and install software patches, Valve gradually transformed it into one of the first all-digital stores for PC games. Despite recent competition from Epic, Discord, GOG and others, Steam purchases are still estimated to account for a significant portion of PC game sales worldwide, with some analysts assigning up to 18% of the overall market to Steam.