Too many games!
Tom is really slacking on reviews… :p
I still predict acquisition.
Wasn’t it mentioned before that China No 1 , was the reason for the influx of older PC hardware on the survey?
Which is great, more focus on Vulkan / Win7+8 than Win10 is good for everyone.
So Steam doesn’t want your bitcoins anymore:
Is this a sign of the coming reckoning for Bitcoin?
Steam’s revenue-based top lists are up. In addition to the annual list, they now also have another one grouped by month of release:
http://store.steampowered.com/best_of_2017/
Remember that the order within each category is randomized on each page load.
The top tier is really surprising to me. Witcher 3 is still selling that well? I’d thought Divinity Original Sin 2 was a far more niche title than that. And Rainbox Six Siege, wtf?! I’d heard the scuttlebutt about Ubisoft “supporting it well” and “rescuing it after a disastrous launch”. But I had no idea they meant that a game released in 2015 was one of the top 12 most successful games on Steam in 2017.
It is dumb Nier Automata isn’t on sale, I dunno what they are thinking.
Sold over a million copies , its mainstream. :)
Yeah talk about a game that went from meh to loved by many and supported with seasons of content. Crazy!
I think the real question is “what the hell is doing Skyrim there”.
Or… “Wallpaper Engine” in the same category as ‘Grim Dawn’ and ‘Dying Light’ :-X
Good to see Warframe on top though, even if they did have to share it with CS.
2017 review…
Nothing too surprising in there, Chinese players play a lot of games but don’t buy many, there are too many indies, if your new release doesn’t break into the first few pages of Top Sellers it probably never will, and people wait for sales.
The most interesting statement was that League of Legends and Minecraft are both individually bigger than Steam. I didn’t realize that.
I was at GDC a couple weeks ago and attended Sergey’s panel where he first presented that data.
I definitely want to hear more details about the Chinese cybercafe business he describes there. If that specific detail is underestimated, it will paint a completely different picture than what the raw SteamSpy data represents.
For example, my impression throughout all of 2017 was that PUBG is what finally got Chinese players into Steam, resulting in the massive swing in Windows 7 vs. Windows 10 numbers, and along with it potentially a burgeoning new Chinese audience for developers to sell their games to on Steam.
But the presentation kind of buries the lede in there, presuming that it’s far more likely that tens of millions of new Steam accounts are being set up repeatedly in gaming cafes in China, heavily skewing the results, and of all of those tens of millions of accounts, they’re either buying nothing, or buying only PUBG.
Sergey also described in his talk at GDC that it makes economic sense for these cafes to continually buy new copies of PUBG for new accounts, over and over again, as previous accounts get banned for whatever reason - PUBG is cheap enough in Steam that only a few hours’ play in a cafe will pay for a new copy, when people get banned for cheating or other reasons it’s not that big of a deal for them.
To me, as a part-time data nerd who does a lot of data analysis for my job, this is a classic example where comprehensive data insights might be extremely misleading if that data is missing some extremely important key details.
I imagine it’s the same business model it started in Korea, the PC bangs, that with time it also has been extended through China.
I do appreciate that the article includes time to read, that adds a fun meta-game aspect. “What, nine minutes to read this? I can do it in five.”
I read it in four minutes.
But that’s because my hour was up at the Chinese PC cafe.
Interesting. I was always wondering why so many Chinese players would risk their PUBG account by cheating, but this explains it.
I couldn’t think where else to post this, but Steamspy’s shutting down following changes to privacy settings on Steam.
Excellent news. I wish they had done it years ago.
How come? I thought the info was useful. Does this then break all those things that shame me and my 1000+ unplayed collection like Steam Calculator, SteamCharts (poor LawBreakers and Battleborn) ?