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.

Comments

Is Linux now a reasonnable gaming OS ?

[godrik]

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 ?

Re:Is Linux now a reasonnable gaming OS ?

[Dutch Gun]

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.

Re:Is Linux now a reasonnable gaming OS ?

[Carewolf]

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 ?

I only do impulse purchases of games that run on Linux. Which in the category of strategy games that I play is basically all of them. It is very viable. The only problems are games demanding high-end graphics. X-COM 2 for instance ran on Linux, but already had a few graphical problems on Windows, and more and worse performance on Linux.

Re:Is Linux now a reasonnable gaming OS ?

[Kjella]

I think that for playing alone, I could now be reasonably content with what's on offer now. There are enough games on Windows that I don't get around to playing them all, so basically it'd just narrow the field. But I have friends and we play games like GTA V and Overwatch and I don't want to be left out. Dual booting is extremely annoying. Buying two high end graphics cards is out. So as much as my inner nerd wants to say yes, it's still no. I might put in my previous graphics card and play lighter titles though, it's on the substitute bench while before it was up in the stands selling hot dogs. And Apple - still the second biggest graphics market - had to go off and do their own thing with Metal instead of Vulkan so there'll be no joint force against DirectX. I'm hoping things will change before Win7 goes out of support, but I'm not optimistic.

Analysis

[mentil]

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).

Re: Analysis

[Goragoth]

Personally the way I refer to these sorts of games is "ethical F2P", and that includes titles such as League of Legends and Path of Exile. Anything that you can reasonably play without dropping a cent into. Interestingly these sorts of games tend to do really well (LoL is the biggest earning game, DotA2 is the biggest on Steam, and other games following this model are also doing very well). Turns out that people don't like it when games are obvious cash-grabs.

Re:Which is free to play

[Tukz]

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.

No Man's Sky

[GrBear]

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.

Re:No Man's Sky

[Lord Crc]

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.

Re:No Man's Sky

[thegarbz]

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.

Well they were investigated

[waspleg]

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.

Interesting how many aren't 2016 games

[Solandri]

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.

Re:No Man's Sky

[LesFerg]

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.