Slashdot Mirror
Valve Reveals Steam's 2016 Top Earners -- Including 'No Man's Sky' (pcgamer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes PC Gamer:
In a surprise announcement today to kick off 2017, Valve has revealed the 100 best-selling Steam games of 2016... Although the "Top Sellers" section of Steam gives a constant sense of what's selling now, Valve hasn't previously compiled an annual list of which Steam games earned the most money... Rather than ranked in order from 1-100, the list is separated into tiers, from Platinum to Bronze, based on revenue (as opposed to copies sold)... Doom didn't crack the top 12, but it may have gotten close: it's ranked somewhere between 13th and 24th
That second-place Gold tier included more modern throwbacks to classic games, including Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, and Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20-Year Celebration. Meanwhile, No Man's Sky, which got off to a rocky start this summer before its massive November update, still turned up in the top "Platinum" tier for revenue earned in 2016. (And it's now discounted 40%.)
In fact, "As an extension of the Winter Sale, all but six of these games are on sale," reports PC Gamer. The other top-earning Steam games were Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Grand Theft Auto V, Civilization VI, and DOTA 2 (which is free to play), as well as Rocket League, XCOM 2, Dark Souls III, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Fallout 4, Total War: Warhammer, and Tom Clancy's The Division.
That second-place Gold tier included more modern throwbacks to classic games, including Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, and Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20-Year Celebration. Meanwhile, No Man's Sky, which got off to a rocky start this summer before its massive November update, still turned up in the top "Platinum" tier for revenue earned in 2016. (And it's now discounted 40%.)
In fact, "As an extension of the Winter Sale, all but six of these games are on sale," reports PC Gamer. The other top-earning Steam games were Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Grand Theft Auto V, Civilization VI, and DOTA 2 (which is free to play), as well as Rocket League, XCOM 2, Dark Souls III, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Fallout 4, Total War: Warhammer, and Tom Clancy's The Division.
I'd say the most significant factor is that Unity and Unreal engines are multi-platform. Steam's native support certainly contributed, of course, but it's very difficult for a game developer to justify spending a lot of engineering effort to support 1% of the market unless you have some significant resources to spend.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I find it particularly confusing how a game rated "Mostly Negative" still had the highest sales revenue.
Almost all of it was pre-launch purchases. Game was hyped into the 8th dimension. it was on the "top sellers" list months before launch.
However, many players spent more than 2 hours playing the game, waiting to find all those neat things they were promised, before they realized the game was not what they had been told it would be. And after 2 hours of game-time you can't refund the game anymore.
Others are still clinging on hoping the devs will fix the mess and release the game they showed the world during E3 and whatnot.
Of the 12 games in their platinum category, half (CS:GO, DOTA 2, Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Grand Theft Auto V, and Rocket League) came out before 2016 (though Fallout 4 had a Nov 2015 release so kinda falls into both years).
Same things with the 12 games in the gold category. Only 4 were released in 2016, 2 in late 2015. And only 5 of the 16 games in the silver category were released in 2016 or late 2015.
Message to game companies: Good older games with long-term playability make as much money as new games with big advertising budgets which are just a flash in the pan. So don't rush it - take the time to playtest it and do it right.