Valve Software has announced the top 100 best games of the year on Steam. While there are not many surprises, it further suggests that the concept of a simple end-of-year outline in the gaming industry is fast becoming a historical artifact. Many of the ‘games of the year’ for 2020, especially on Steam, were not actually new versions.
The way Valve presents Steam’s top sellers is an interesting counterpoint to many of the other end-of-the-year listings, which were obviously more focused on what’s come out over the past twelve months. While Valve’s thumb is slightly on the scale here, as its own games like Spanfort 2 the more than 100 years of earners on the store window, the Steam top 100 paints a better picture of the general market than a simple annual top 10.
The latest list shows that making money in publishing games in 2020 is not just finding an audience, especially not on the computer. It’s about keeping it going for as long as possible, and the best-earning games on Steam have managed to grab their communities ’attention for years.
As usual, Bellevue, Wash.-Based Valve, measures a game’s annual performance based on its total gross revenue, rather than just individual sales. These include content packages, extensions, cosmetic purchases, paid currencies in the app and other various revenue streams. Valve also does not offer quick numbers on the subject, preferring to award games in one of four categories – Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze – based on their overall financial performance. We know the overall top 12 games of the year as they achieved a Platinum rank, but not exactly how they fared with each other.
As the norm became, only a relatively handful of 2020 versions were one of the best gains of the year. Of the twelve games that ranked Platinum in Steam’s rankings, only three were – Doom Eternal, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, and Cyberpunk 2077 – has actually come out the last 12 months.
Expand it to the top 40 games overall in the Platinum, Gold and Silver rankings, adding just five more modern versions: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, Baldur’s Gate 3, Fasmophobia, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Hades. Of the full top 100 for 2020, only 31 of them have been released on Steam, and a handful of them are recent havens from older games, such as Hideo Kojima’s dream logic adventure in 2019. Death Stranding.
Valve has also entered into an agreement with California mega-publisher Electronic Arts to bring back some of its games to Steam in early September, which were previously only sold through EA’s personal online store window. The result is that some of Steam’s best performances this year are the harbors of some of EA’s most recent earners, such as The Sims 4 and the head-to-head hero shooter Apex Legends.
The rest of the top 100 are a variety of “games as a service”, which introduce new content to their players throughout the year, i.e. Microsoft Sea of Thieves; titles with recent major expansions, such as the free-to-play dungeon crawler Path of exile; and a handful of perennial top sellers, such as Grand Theft Auto V, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, and the action-adventure sandbox Terraria, which launched its fourth and final major update in May.
The most lucrative games on Steam’s top 100 are in the order of Valve:
- DOTA 2, Valve’s own multiplayer battle arena
- Doom Eternal, the latest installment in id Software’s classic series of shooters
- Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, a streamer-friendly competitive game where players try to be the last to fall off a cartoon-like obstacle course
- Grand Theft Auto V, the # 2 best-selling game of all time, further driven by the 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 right at the end of last year
- Rainbow Six: Siege, which successfully mixes his series’ pseudo-realistic action with the mechanics of ‘hero shooter’ of something like Ear Watch
- Counter-Strike, Valve’s seemingly eternal head-to-head shooter
- PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the original battle royale experience
- Between us, this year’s sudden viral success story
- Destiny 2, the release of its latest expansion, Out of the light
- Cyberpunk 2077, CD Project Red’s science fiction RPG
Some other high-earners in the Pacific Northwest on Steam in 2020 include 343 Industries Halo: The Master Chief Collection, a compilation of the first four Halo games that made their final Steam debut right at the end of 2019; Based, An Xbox Game Studios-published survival / adventure about children who have shrunk to microscopic size; ConcernedApe’s Indie Farming Hit Stardew Valley, which released a major content update on Monday with its 1.5 patch; Marvel’s Avengers, developed in Bellevue, Wash., by Crystal Dynamics, which charged players with rebuilding the famous superhero team; and Valve’s own Half-life: Alyx, which recently cleared the industry awards as a “killer app” for virtual reality.
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 counted its own record for concurrent players during the course of the year three different times and on December 12 achieved just under 24.7 million concurrent users. It is assumed that this is related to the launch of December 10 of Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most anticipated games of the year, and which actually works pretty well on higher-end computers.
Steam celebrated its 17thde anniversary in September. Initially established as a specialized client to make it easier for players of Valve-developed games such as Half life to find and install software patches, Valve slowly developed them into one of the first all-digital store windows for computer games. Despite recent competition from Epic, Discord, GOG and others, purchases on Steam will still account for a significant share of computer game sales worldwide, with some analysts attributing as much as 18% of the total market to Steam.