Steam “Best of 2018” Lists; A Look Back At 2018
Today we're unveiling lists of the top selling and top played games on Steam in 2018! Like last year, we've built five lists - Top Sellers, Top New Releases, Top Selling VR Titles, Top Early Access Grads, and Most Played Games.
Top Sellers
We started with the basics by looking at overall Top Sellers. This is a list of the games that earned the most revenue in 2018, which includes all different kinds of Steam revenue; game sales, in-game transactions, and DLC. The resulting list includes a mix of free-to-play and premium games.
Here's the list of
Top Selling Games of 2018!
Top New Releases
This page highlights the 150 top-selling games released in 2018, split out by their month of release. To build this list, we looked at a combination of first-week revenue and overall revenue in 2018 to create a list of games that had achieved a sizable level of commercial success, regardless of when during the year each title released.
We find it pretty interesting how much variation there is from month to month. For example, December is a busy month and a lot of activity to compete with, so it's understandable that it might be a less desirable month to release in. But April only had 5 releases that made our list and July only had 6, whereas February was the busiest month with 22 popular releases.
Here's the list of
Top Selling New Releases of 2018!
Top Selling VR Titles
This year again saw over 1,000 new releases with Virtual Reality support, with almost all of those (over 900) being VR-only experiences. Top VR sellers included new releases such as Beat Saber, Blade & Sorcery, Budget Cuts, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR, plus some of last-year's top hits including Fallout 4 VR and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. There were even some classics appearing in top for the third year in a row, such as RAW DATA and Arizona Sunshine.
Our list this year highlights the leading VR titles by sharing the 100 top selling VR titles of 2018, plus a new section on the page for the top 20 VR releases of 2018.
Here's the list of
Top Selling VR Titles of 2018!
Top Early Access Grads
This year's batch of notable titles launching through Steam Early Access includes the hugely popular games Raft and SCUM, and the VR-only experience Beat Saber. Meanwhile many popular titles such as DayZ, The Forest, and RimWorld made their transition from Early Access to full release in 2018.
We wanted to recognize the games that have worked hard to build happy communities and make the transition from Early Access to full release this year. So, we've put together a list of the top 50 games that transitioned out of Early Access to full release during 2018, as measured by revenue earned during 2018 (during Early Access and after full release).
Here's the list of
Top Early Access Grads of 2018!
Most Played Games
The Most Played Games list contains games that had more than 15,000 simultaneous players at some point during the year. To fully recognize the games that have built a significant community and player base, we've excluded a number of games that only had short-term spikes in player count due to running giveaways.
Here's the list of
Most Played Games of 2018!
Notes:
We don't disclose specific revenue for the lists, but top sellers are broken into four categories in order to give you an idea of how they placed:
Platinum: 1st - 12th Top Seller
Gold: 13th - 24th Top Seller
Silver: 25th - 40th Top Seller
Bronze: 41st - 100th Top Seller
Thanks for reading, and for another great year on Steam! We're constantly surprised by the amazing new games that seem to come out of nowhere, delight their audiences and end up on these lists (and in our Steam libraries) by year-end.
Also, don't forget to check out the Steam Winter Sale, on now through January 3rd. Many of the titles in the lists above are on great discounts, and these lists are a great way to see which games were resonating the most with players this year.
-The Steam Team
