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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.
Apparently not.
Prepare to lose even more in 2017!
SteamOS may yet have its day, but only if Valve is bought out by some evil multinational corporation like NBCUniversal or AT&T.
The sequel, tentatively titled "Grab the Sky By the Pussy", will feature Donal Trump.
Interestingly, about half of the game in that top 100 list are available for Linux. That is about the same number available for Mac. Obviously they are all available for windows.
I have been casually playing on Debian using steam. And I do find enough game to keep me entertained. I am not sure whether Unity, steam OS, or the need to port games to mobile systems contributed to the increase in gaming support for Linux. But Linux definitely seems to have reasonable gaming options.
Opinions ?
Looking at the list, half of the Platinum earners are RPGs and strategy games, with 3 shooters. Of the Gold earners, 9/12 are shooters. Of the Silver earners, 6/16 are strategy/simulation games. Throughout, many of the highest earners are zombie-themed, open-world, or survival sandbox games. There are 1, 2, 2, and 3 free-to-play games in the Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze categories respectively. Yes, the highest-earning f2p game is Dota2.
This suggests that niche titles (RPGs, simulation/strategy titles) are some of the best-sellers on PC, as these genres have traditionally been under-served on consoles (think Diablo 1 on PSX compared to Baldur's Gate, rather than a consolified RPG like Witcher 3).
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
If Valve has profit from it they have money to refund. The game's a ripoff and they clearly know it.
to earn so much money on a game with a community such as CS:GO, and letting the good, friendly players put up with it. There are so many things they could do to clean the community up a bit, but of course it's better to keep the bad eggs since they are also spending money. Fucking criminal.
when the Windows Store went *pop*. If that new games for windows thing they pushed with Killer Instinct & Forza had taken off maybe Valve would get the jeebees scared enough to go back to it, but right now it's looking kinda tepid.
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I find it particularly confusing how a game rated "Mostly Negative" still had the highest sales revenue. At first I thought it was based on sales and didn't include refunds.. but apparently it's based on revenue, which should include refunds.
At some point I read Steam stopped giving refunds on it, so perhaps there were a large populous that maybe didn't read the reviews before purchasing it.. or actually enjoyed the limited gameplay.
How can the free to play games end up in the top 100 as measured by gross revenue. There must be a whole lot of optional purchases going on.
And rather handsomely as No Man's Sky shows. Apparently, the only thing they needed to do is make the first 3-4 hours interesting and give people some false hope. Personally, I canceled my pre-order after reading the early reviews.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
30% my collection has Linux ports and that excludes most of the AAA titles, you can check on steamdb.info there is a calculator which shows your account value and other things.
The Linux filter is dead last in the list and you have to scroll to get to it - rather telling unfortunately.
It's definitely getting better but not enough to ditch Windows 7. I guess it depends on whether what you want to play/buy is listed there.
There are also some non-Steam things that work with Wine like I play Hearthstone which runs well under battle.net (Blizzard) on my Mint Thinkpad without issues.
for false advertising in the UK and cleared according to a Forbes article I won't like because even with my extensive ad blocking it was barely legible.
Here's a /. story about a lot of begrudgingly given refunds
I read about it before it was released and it looked like another kickstarter-style scam to me and I knew the tears would be copious especially where they billed it as multiplayer but then said your chances of actually encountering someone else would be astronomically low.
There is a unfulfilled change.org petition and lots of other shit out there about it. I still have 0 interest personally.
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.
What, is the voice actor for Gordon Freeman busy or something?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Go back to reddit
Of the games listed, I don't own any of the Platinum, Gold, or Silver. Of the Bronze group, I own very few games.of the games (5 of them, although one is on Origin not Steam).--and I own 1097 games. Most of this is because almost all games I buy I obtain in bundles or through trades. The bigger reason is that very few of the listed games are ones I'm interested in. In honesty, probably three-quarters of those 1097 games are ones I'm not really interested in but before I started trying to gift/trade away games.
Even so, I'm only interested in a meaningful way in some of the Bronze games and none of the Platinum/Gold/Silver games. Some of this, no doubt, is due to their price* or because I have a marginally comparable game in my own library of games. The biggest reason though is simply way too many are focused on either open world, crafting, or online play. The first too get old very quickly and online play has long ago lost its major draw for me**. I would say I am pleasantly surprised with the large number of metroidvanias, shooters, and generally good platforms (2d or 3d). Still, it's sort of depressing to see the list and know that they're the sort of games most enjoyed by people.
* It's not that I don't have the money. It's that it's hard to justify buying a $30 game (which is at a ~50% discount) when even a bundle like Yogscast which included a lot of games there were worthless to me gave me a better value ratio (even without trades). At this point, buying a $30 game makes me think I either (1) have to play a lot of it to try to justify the cost to myself or (2) try to justify the cost towards others (even though no one asks) because it seems ludicrous given you can get a good bundle of games for $3 worth a lot more than a $30 game. Of course, there's also a lot of crap bundles. But I'd even still contend you'd be better off buying 10 bundles straight from Indiegala or Bundlestars at $3 (or however many to add up to $30 for bundles that don't go over $4) than that one $30 game. Which makes me wonder if that's what's messing up the stats.
** FPSs were fun but you need really low latency. And now that we've got tons of people who make those games nearly a life of theirs, it's better to just avoid them if you want to have any serious fun--or you want to become a master of the game. MMOs? Not worth the money. Most other 4x/strategy/whatever? I'd probably rather play against a computer, honestly, or in a single player campaign. In the end, though, it'd still probably not be worth it.to invest the time. That last part is probably the biggest refrain that refrains me from choosing much other than games I can just quickly play and resume later. Or for which playthroughs are short enough I can do a run and improve and play again.
The writer of Half-Life retired over 2 years ago.
I have to say it's great seeing a F2P game done right, like Path of Exile, hit the top 100 revenue earner on Steam. Great game by the way for you Diablo lovers.
is Half Life 3 the new Duke Nukem Forever?
Valve invented the roller-coaster scripted FPS, so they had a huge first mover advantage. Today? There's been a Call of Duty every year, whatever other games I don't care about to be aware of them or remember them, and similar follow-the-yellow-line third person games like Uncharted. Importantly, they're big budget Hollywood-like shit, that most people can't play on their PC.
Valve does games that play on laptops and consumer PCs. If they make a high budget Half-Life 3, it will be an incentive for their customers to go buy an Xbox or PS4 to play it, or to buy it on one of these. This doesn't draw customer to the Steam store. If they make it high budget, Steam only, it might struggle to have enough sales to recoup the costs, or people will be dissatisfied seeing it run at 15fps on their laptop?
If they make it friendly to lowly hardware, it can be quite a success. But it will be ridiculed by all the elitist snobs with their i5s and i7s and big vid cards. Even though games haven't changed since 2004 except for bumping up the specs and showing more triangles and pixels (my opinion)
Fuck it, the last then-recent game I remember running on my PC was Left 4 Dead. I since gave up on almost all games. I refuse to spend $1000 on upgrades, or just to buy the right $150 card to play games on linux, poorly. Just as with all those people refusing to buy a $400-$500 tablet.
Isn't this based on reviews and votes, not purchases? Look on PSN and the game has over 130,000 thumbs up, compare that to Dark Souls 3 which has about 70,000