Steam Reveals Top-Selling And Most-Played Games Of 2023 And Many Are On Sale
This data is particularly neat to see because Valve doesn't publish financials, as it doesn't have to. All those financial reports you see on other big companies originate with regulatory requirements for publicly-traded entities to divulge that information. Valve is still privately-owned, so there's no requirement for the company to publish this data, but it does so anyway—likely because sites like us report on it.
Given the source, we have to assume that this means "revenues for Valve". In other words, this list wouldn't include money made by a particular game on the Microsoft Store, Epic Games Store, or another platform altogether (like Xbox.) We also have to keep in mind that the list isn't ordered; the order of games listed within each ranking is random. Still, it's a fascinating look into what Steam gamers are spending money on.
The general "Top Sellers" list can be further filtered into "New Releases", "Most Played", "Early Access", "Steam Deck", "Controller", and "VR" categories. The New Releases list is obviously limited to games that came out in 2023, while the "Most Played" list judges games based on their highest concurrent player count, not on played time (which is easy to fudge.) Contrary to what you might expect, the Early Access category actually lists games that graduated from EA this year, and then the latter three categories are fairly self-explanatory.
Looking at the Top Sellers list, in the highest "Platinum" category, there are some familiar faces like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2 as well as some wholly-expected appearances from award-winning games like Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, and Cyberpunk 2077 (thanks to its Phantom Liberty expansion.) The biggest live-service games, like Destiny 2, PUBG Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, and of course, Call of Duty all appear here, too. There are a few more unexpected entries, though, including indie survival-craft game Sons of the Forest, and somewhat surprisingly, Starfield, which is down to 28% positive recent reviews on Steam.
A year after its release, Elden Ring continued to see strong sales, placing it into the Gold category this year despite its long-awaited Shadow of the Erdtree expansion being MIA. Live service titles like Warframe, Rainbow Six: Siege, War Thunder, and Dead by Daylight all appear in this tier, as well as FromSoftware's Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. Not bad for a challenging action game with relatively limited appeal. Notably, GTA V falls to the Gold tier for the first time, and we also see Red Dead Redemption II land in this category as well.
Going over the data, there are some fascinating observations to make when comparing the overall Top Sellers to the New Releases. As you may have already noticed in the listing above, the majority of the top sellers were not new games that came out this year, suggesting that more and more gamers are favoring live service games for better or for worse.
Still, there were some huge releases this year; the aforementioned Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, Sons of the Forest, and Starfield are joined in the Platinum category by Remnant II, the Resident Evil 4 remake, Street Fighter 6, Cities Skylines II, Payday 3, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, and EA's FC24. Many of those games were down in the Silver or Bronze category on the overall top sellers list.
Down in the Gold category for new releases, we start to see the presence of what are arguably indie titles, including games like Dave the Diver, Battle Bit Remastered, Atomic Heart, and Party Animals, right alongside established names like Mortal Kombat 1, the Dead Space remake, The Outlast Trials, and Koei-Tecmo's underrated Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. Incredibly, brand-new competitive shooter The Finals made it up into this category, too, despite that it was only out for one week of the data collection period ending December 15th.
There's a whole bunch more interesting data here if you're keen to look at it; far too much for us to cover in a single news post. If you're curious, head over to the Steam Best of 2023 page to have a look, but make sure you aren't signed in to Steam when you do because any games you've marked "ignored" will be hidden from this page, so either log out or open it in an incognito window.
