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.
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 ?
When someone asks you to polish a turd, what they are really telling you to do is cover it in gold spray paint and glitter.
Knowing this is important, some people have actually tried to fix impossible messes.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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 you are referring to DOTA 2, it's completely free and there is no "pay 2 win".
Purchases are entirely cosmetics.
And people are spending a stupid amount of money on cosmetics, just look at CS:GO.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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.
Indeed. If customers do not punish game-makers for bad quality and broken promises, what do people expect to happen next time?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Well considering almost all of the revenue from the game comes from what is essentially a built in slot-machine I don't think the actual FPS play is of much concern to them anymore.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
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.
At first I read your title line to mean that NMS needs a new funding campaign to bring out more content.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.
Pre-orders. The game was waaaaay popular for the first day with huge download and player volumes.
No Man's Sky is currently hovering between the 1000-2000 active player mark. Before the patch to fix many of the issues it was around 300-500 players. Opening weekend was looking more like 200000. People played it, thought it was shit and then either didn't get a refund or weren't granted a refund.
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.
But its a fantastic study of how long your perseverance can push past your dwindling curiosity.
I particularly like the non-repetitive realism:
You are on a very cold planet and will shortly die, unless you get under some overhanging earth and into the shade, where the planet is *less* cold.
You are on a very radioactive planet and will shortly die, unless you get under ground, where the planet is *less* radioactive.
I haven't got to my 3rd planet yet, but I expect it will be a very hot planet, where you will shortly die, unless you get underground, where the planet is *less* hot.
And why are there "sentinels" flying around getting pissed at you for mining? Presumably the player is trespassing on pre-claimed land and stealing the mineral resources of another race. So they are promoting theft as adventure?
I should stop over-analyzing this.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
I find it particularly confusing how a game rated "Mostly Negative" still had the highest sales revenue.
Maybe it is because a significant portion of owners have not played the game yet. There are a lot of gamers who buy more games than they can play (especially indie titles). If you already have a large backlog of games and then you hear reports that the game hasn't delivered on all the features they claimed it would have, then it isn't a problem to put it on your backlog and wait for future patches to improve the gameplay wasting time on a half-finished game.
Now if you don't mind, I must go and try this Half Life 2 that they came out with. I hear that it's going to be the next big thing!
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.
Steam refund is a joke.
They have a policy that they only refund games that have been "played" for less than two hours. If you can't get a game to start, and spend more than 2 hours trying to troubleshoot it, they adamantly refuse to refund anything, even if your actual play time is zero.
There's no way of escalating or get in touch with a human.
You're looking at the wrong number. You should be looking at the vote totals. Since you have to pay in order to leave a rating this makes perfect sense.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Worth noting that it is a STEAM top earner where the vast majority of spending in the game doesn't involve Steam.
Steam accepted refunds for weeks after purchase for this particular game, simply because the backlash was so huge. The lack of the expected revenue loss was NOT because people couldn't refund it.
The truth of the matter is, while it didn't deserve the absurd fan generated hype by any means, it wasn't that bad. Not great, not bad, just meh. A small, though larger than normal, portion of the gaming population were extremely upset over this, but for most people it's not that different than any other game, and isn't enough to get a refund over..
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I asked for a refund and explained the circumstances in the Details box. Even though I was over the 2 hour mark, they refunded it without issue.
My experience is that they don't read the comments box at all. Even if I explained that i had zero play time because i could not get past the installer/launcher, I received a boilerplate reply that it could not be refunded because play time exceeded 2 hours. There seems to be no way to escalate or get in touch with a human. Attempting to resubmit the request with a big PLEASE READ in front of it did not help - same boilerplate reply.
I wasn't talking about the reason, just the repetition.
Next I landed on a "toxic" planet. I would die if I stayed on the surface. Underground it was less "toxic". You don't think the pattern is a little over used?
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.